Using github actions to publish documentation

Question

What I considered:

• github offers github pages to host documentation in either a folder on my master branch or a dedicated gh-pages br

Answer 1

In the case of managing sphinx using pip (requirements.txt), pipenv, or poetry, we can deploy our documentation to GitHub Pages as follows. For also other Python-based Static Site Generators like pelican and MkDocs, the workflow works as same. Here is a simple example of MkDocs. We just add the workflow as .github/workflows/gh-pages.yml

For more options, see the latest README: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages: GitHub Actions for GitHub Pages

Answer 2

I got it to work, but there is no dedicated action to build and host sphinx docs on either github pages or readthedocs as of yet, so as far as I am concerned there is quite a bit left to be desired here.

This is my current release_sphinx job that uses the deploy-action-for-github-pages action and uploads to github-pages:

release_sphinx:
  needs: [build]
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  container:
    image: python:3.6
    volumes:
      - dist:dist
      - public:public
  steps:

    # check out sources that will be used for autodocs, plus readme
    - uses: actions/checkout@v1

    # download wheel that was build and uploaded in the build step
    - uses: actions/download-artifact@v1
      with:
        name: distributions
        path: dist

    # didn't need to change anything here, but had to add sphinx.ext.githubpages
    # to my conf.py extensions list. that fixes the broken uploads
    - name: Building documentation
      run: |
        pip install dist/*.whl
        pip install sphinx Pallets-Sphinx-Themes
        sphinx-apidoc --no-toc --module-first -o docs/autodoc src/stenotype
        sphinx-build docs public -b dirhtml

    # still need to build and set the PAT to get a rebuild on the pages job,
    # apart from that quite clean and nice 
    - name: github pages deploy
      uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v2.3.1
      env:
        PERSONAL_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PAT }}
        PUBLISH_BRANCH: gh-pages
        PUBLISH_DIR: public

    # since gh-pages has a history, this step might no longer be necessary.
    - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v1
      with:
        name: documentation
        path: public

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Shoutout to the deploy action's maintainer, who resolved the upload problem within 8 minutes of me posting it as an issue.