Lightweight Versioned GitLab Pages

Generate index page with links to all previously archived folders during a tag build.

This repo developed in and mirrored from GitLab brainelectronics. Please raise your issues and submit your pull requests/merge requests there.

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Installation

pip install lightweight-versioned-gitlab-pages

Documentation

📚 The latest documentation is available at

• Lightweight versioned GitLab Pages GitLab Pages
• Lightweight versioned GitLab Pages ReadTheDocs

Reasoning

GitLab offers the possibility to create or place a folder named public in the root of the repo. The contents of this folder are then displayed by GitLab pages and is accessible from outside the repo via a custom URL.

For this package, the URL is https://brainelectronics.gitlab.io/-/lightweight-versioned-gitlab-pages. This is also the location of the (latest) documentation for this package. Since only only one "thing" can be displayed there, usually only the most recent content is available at this URL. This is where this package is supposed to help.

Usage

It is assumed that only tagged states of the documentation or other content will be displayed on the GitLab Pages web page, see also chapter Limitations.

For interaction with GitLab the python-gitlab package is used.

A unique project ID must be specified with --project-id. This ID can be found at the top of each repo. For this repository it is 43170198.

The second mandatory parameter is --job-name. This is the name of the job that generates, for example, the documentation or other content that will be displayed via the GitLab pages web page.

The generated index.html is placed in a folder named public. By default this folder is created in the same directory from which this script is called. A different destination folder can be specified with --output-dir. The folder does not have to exist, it and its possibly needed parent directories will be created if necessary.

If a self-hosted GitLab is used, the URL to the instance can be specified with --url to not restrict this package to GitLab.com only.

In case the CICD artifacts are not publicly available, the script requires an API token to make all requests through the API. This token must then be specified via the --private-token argument. The token can be generated via Settings -> Access Tokens and requires api scope.

Help

generate-versioned-pages --help

Generate lightweight versioned pages

The following command will create a folder named public at the current location and place an index HTML file inside.

This index file contains a simple list of Bootstrap cards with all previously built tags and the URL to the public pages archive files.

generate-versioned-pages \
--project-id 43170198 \
--job-name pages

Then use this generated folder in the pages job. The job configuration in the file .gitlab-ci.yml can look like the following example and is used in that way for this package.

pages:
  stage: deploy
  before_script:
    - pip install lightweight-versioned-gitlab-pages
  script:
    - generate-versioned-pages
      --project-id ${CI_PROJECT_ID}
      --job-name generate-docs
  artifacts:
    expire_in: never
    paths:
      - public
  only:
    - main

How it works

First, the available tags of the repo are requested/gathered by the get_project_tags function. For each tag, the corresponding pipeline job is requested based on the provided job-name argument. The job status must be successful to avoid erroneous or currently generated artifacts. For each job, the URL to the index file of the public folder is generated, see get_artifact_url The generated list of TagInfos will then be used to create a simple index.html file inside a generated public folder, unless it is to be generated elsewhere. The template is rendered with Jinja2.

Advanced Usage

Custom index file

To allow users the usage of a different style index file, the --template-file is there to help.

By default the index template file delivered with this package is used for rendering. A list of TagInfos and the base URL of tags (tag_base_url) is handed over to the Jinj2 render function.

The following informations are availabe for individual usage:

Name	Type	Description
tag_base_url	str	URL to the project tags, e.g. https://gitlab.com/brainelectronics/lightweight-versioned-gitlab-pages/-/tags/
items	List[TagInfos]	List of TagInfo elements

Each TagInfo element contains the following fields

Name	Type	Description
tag	ProjectTag	GitLab ProjectTag
commit	ProjectCommit	GitLab ProjectCommit
created_at	datetime	Datetime object with the datetime of the tag creation
job_id	int	ID of the Job created the tag
pages_url	str	Full URL to the generated public index file of the job
job_ids	List[Dict[str, int]]	List of pipeline IDs which ran during the job

Custom output directory

Save the rendered index file to a different folder than the default public folder in the directory where the script is executed.

generate-versioned-pages \
--project-id 43170198 \
--job-name pages \
--output-dir somewhere/else

The folder and it's may required parent directories are automatically generated. The output file name is fixed as index.html

Version info file

To get more informations about the used tags, the --create-version-info-file argument can be used. This will generate a versions.json file in the output directory containing all GitLab ProjectTag and GitLab ProjectCommit attributes, the Job ID and the Pages URL.

Limitations

• Only links to tagged and archived data of public folders are included in the index
• Job artifacts must be publicly accessible if no API token is used
  • Make sure that CI/CD is activated and set to Everyone With Access at Settings -> General -> Visibility