Document in more detail how mirror a universe repository to netlify or github pages or elsewhere

[jeroen]

Elaborate on this: https://docs.r-universe.dev/install/reproducibility.html#using-snapshots

Instead of just linking to https://github.com/jeroen/backup, it would be nice to explain this in more detail.

Perhaps we can create a simple shell script that users can run on e.g. netlify runner, which downloads and extracts a copy of the repo from the snapshot api. So that way users can control when the mirror is updated by triggering the build on netlify.

Also for github-pages perhaps it might be possible to use the github deploy API and simply set the artifact_url to the snapshot url? That would be really convenient if it works.

Let's experiment a bit with a few methods and see if we can easily set up a self-updating mirror for e.g. the ropensci universe, which is about 6GB total if we include all binaries.

[maelle]

I wonder whether the content of this example should be part of the docs, or a tech note. I'd tend towards the later.

I need to prepare another tech note (announcing the docs website).

[jeroen]

We could do both. I thought the idea was that we would try to aggregate information from technotes into the docs as well? Such that it becomes a searchable reference? Otherwise the information becomes even more difficult to find.

[jeroen]

There is also cloudflare pages which has a limit of 20,000 files of max 25mb each, and almost no limits beyond that: https://mattsayar.com/why-does-cloudflare-pages-have-such-a-generous-free-tier/