Add manual build and deploy to help learning experience

[oscar6echo]

As a user, I would rather not jump directly to full automation - with GA.
Instead, I am much more interested to go step by step, and only when full understood, use magical automation.

Somebody who wants to create a custom jupytelite may start from there and iterate/change the repo to fine tune their specifics.
Then the deploy script is so fast that in many cases it is a good option to just run it - like you would run say a "git push --tags".

Hope this helps.

[oscar6echo]

btw maybe there could be a refenrece to the official doc to indicate this step by step deploy approach.

[epugh]

I like this... I've found that customizing jupyterlite for embedding in Quepid has been daunting at times... A lot of concepts to engage with!

[jtpio]

btw maybe there could be a refenrece to the official doc to indicate this step by step deploy approach.

I think that was the intent of this guide: https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart/standalone.html

Otherwise maybe there could be a new guide under this section called "Deploy to GitHub Pages manually": https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howto/index.html#deploying

Note there is also this tutorial I was hoping to contribute some parts of it to the main docs: https://pyconde2023-jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html

[jtpio]

The gh-pages approach has the drawback of increasing the repo size quite significantly.

Also the GitHub Action to deploy to GitHub Pages will likely be default way soon.

[jtpio]

So not sure about recommending using gh-pages (even though it's been there for years)

[oscar6echo]

Is not "Github Pages" and "gh-pages" the same thing ?
Any deployment must necessarily provide the static site somewhere, right ?
And the latest stage is enough - no need for history.
If so, this is what the deploy script does.

Now deploying on github is not a reco in my mind, just a fast way to test, available to anybody.

[oscar6echo]

Even faster is local deploy - added in the section - this brings attention to the dist repo.

[oscar6echo]

I think that was the intent of this guide: https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart/standalone.html

Otherwise maybe there could be a new guide under this section called "Deploy to GitHub Pages manually": https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howto/index.html#deploying

I agree this step by step "local first" guide may be available in several places and shapes. I have no strong opinion about it.

In my mind this PR is not necessarily meant to be merged, rather to show how a user - like me, but I cannot be that special - would go about trying jupyterlite beyond the initial demo effect provided by the full automatic process. There is nothing like running commands in terminal, watching the effects, adjust, all the way to deployment. This is all the more true for a static site which can easily be tweaked before deploy.

If you prefer taking pieces of it, or just the genral idea to write it differently, this is 100% fine with me.

(But writing it as a PR enabled me to test it)