library-documentation-action

A GitHub Action that generates documentation for a Pony library and updates that documentation on GitHub pages. The library in question must have a Makefile with a target docs that can be used to generate the documentation that can be feed to mkdocs.

Generated docs are uploaded to the branch generated-documentation in the repo that this action is installed. Once you have run the action for the first time, you can turn on GitHub Pages for your repository with generated-documentation as the branch to build from. After turning on GitHub pages, your new documentation site should be available within a couple minutes.

You need to supply the url of your site to the action in the site_url option. For GitHub pages, that domain will be https://USER_OR_ORG_NAME.github.io/REPOSITORY_NAME/.

Example workflow

In release.yaml, in addition the usual release-bot-action workflow entries.

name: Release

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+'

jobs:
  generate-documentation:
    name: Generate documentation for release
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4.1.1
      - name: Generate documentation and upload
        uses: docker://ponylang/library-documentation-action:release
        with:
          site_url: "https://MYORG.github.io/MYLIBRARY/"
          library_name: "MYLIBRARY"
          docs_build_dir: "build/MY-LIBRARY-docs"
          git_user_name: "Ponylang Main Bot"
          git_user_email: "ponylang.main@gmail.com"
        env:
          RELEASE_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_TOKEN }}

N.B. The environment variable RELEASE_TOKEN that is required by each step must be a personal access token with public_repo access. You can not use the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable provided by GitHub's action environment. If you try to use GITHUB_TOKEN, the action will fail when trying to upload the built documentation.

Alternatively, you can use a Deploy Key with write access by setting the DEPLOY_KEY environment variable:

name: Release

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+'

jobs:
  generate-documentation:
    name: Generate documentation for release
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4.1.1
      - name: Generate documentation and upload
        uses: docker://ponylang/library-documentation-action:release
        with:
          site_url: "https://MYORG.github.io/MYLIBRARY/"
          library_name: "MYLIBRARY"
          docs_build_dir: "build/MY-LIBRARY-docs"
          git_user_name: "Ponylang Main Bot"
          git_user_email: "ponylang.main@gmail.com"
        env:
          DEPLOY_KEY: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_KEY }}

Manually triggering a documentation build and deploy

GitHub has a workflow_dispatch event that provides a button the actions UI to trigger the workflow. You can set up a workflow to respond to a workflow_dispatch if you need to regenerate documentation from the last commit on a given branch without doing a full release.

We suggest that you install the a workflow_dispatch driven workflow to generate documentation the when you first install this action so you don't need to do a superfluous release.

name: Manually generate documentation

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      library_name:
        description: 'Name of the library being uploaded'
        required: true
      docs_build_dir:
        description: 'Location, relative to the Makefile, that generated documentation will be placed'
        required: true
      site_url:
        description: 'Url for the site that the documentation will be hosted on'
        required: true
      git_user_name:
        description: 'Name to associate with documentation commits'
        required: true
      git_user_email:
        description: 'Email to associate with documentation commits'
        required: true

jobs:
  generate-documentation:
    name: Generate documentation for release
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4.1.1
      - name: Generate documentation and upload
        uses: docker://ponylang/library-documentation-action:release
        with:
          site_url: ${{ github.event.inputs.site_url }}
          library_name: ${{ github.event.inputs.library_name }}
          docs_build_dir: ${{ github.event.inputs.docs_build_dir }}
          git_user_name: ${{ github.event.inputs.git_user_name }}
          git_user_email: ${{ github.event.inputs.git_user_email }}
        env:
          RELEASE_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_TOKEN }}

Versioning

We used to do versioning for the library-documentation-action but this lead to a lot of extra work each time a new version of ponyc was released. This action is considered feature complete and we don't intend to do any breaking updates to it. It will be deprecated in the future and replaced by a pony documentation command that ships with ponyc.

Until then, to use this action, you should be tracking the release docker image and keeping your library up-to-date with any breaking ponyc changes. Using this action without keeping up with changes in ponyc will result in the action failing because the ponyc in the action image is incompatible with your code.