Per-branch documentation review

Note

The templates uses the shared host doc.mel.vin which is for internal use only. You need a webserver with rsync (secure) or some other way to upload and delete things from a CI job like ftp (insecure).

For every commit pushed to any branch generated documentation is published to a webserver in the style of some.tld/${GROUP}/${PROJECT}. For the template itself rsync is used over SSH as it is most secure.

The advantage of having a deployment per branch is that the reviewer of a merge request doesn’t have to check out locally and build documentation in order to look at the changes. A link to the online environment is shown on the merge request page itself.

The deployment environment is dynamically created when a new branch is created on GitLab. The environment is also dynamically stopped and cleaned up after the branch has been deleted, usually when the merge request has been accepted.

GitLab has more documentation regarding this:

• https://about.gitlab.com/features/review-apps/

• https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/

For doc.mel.vin I configured a chrooted, rsync-only account with rssh and pointed the webserver to there. Some more details, primarily intended for users, is available at https://doc.doc.mel.vin/.