added a custom gh pages deploy action

[wxtim]

Replace the default GH Action to create a custom workflow which doesn't try to run Jekyll. Once merged this will need to be enabled in the settings page.

[MetRonnie]

Strange that this has started failing here but not for cylc-doc. From https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#static-site-generators what happens if we just put a .nojekyll file in the root of the gh-pages branch?

[wxtim]

.nojekyll also works, but @oliver-sanders seems enthusiastic about taking more control of what's happening here.

[oliver-sanders]

@oliver-sanders seems enthusiastic about taking more control of what's happening here.

Eh?

We did use the nojekyll approach once, I can't remember why we stopped, perhaps it just seemed nicer to whitelist the Sphinx directories and let Jekyll do its thing rather than hyde it away.

[MetRonnie]

rather than hyde it away.

I see what you did there 😀

Seems to me unless we need extra functionality it would be simpler to avoid the overhead of maintaining a new GH workflow

[wxtim]

FWIW I think .nojekyll does work with this repo, but I think we had to drop it for a good reason for at least one of the Cylc repos.

[wxtim]

Closed because (IMO) .nojekyll is simpler. We might want to resurrect this laters.

[wxtim]

We need this PR because the "doc" symlink breaks the default build. Symlinks are now deprecated in non-actions builds (Feb 23).

• Default "pages build and deployment" workflow without "doc" symlink passes. The webpage doesn't work, of course - the redirect breaks.

There is some reasoning from a GH user marked as a collaborator on a GH post here.

[MetRonnie]

I don't think that affects us?

The majority of Pages sites will not be affected by this change since building with GitHub Actions is the default. If any of your Pages sites is affected, you will receive a build failure email with instructions how to fix the error on your next build.

Unless we have got a build failure email?

[wxtim]

building with GitHub Actions is the default.

@MetRonnie - I think you may be right - my thought process was that

• Build failed, apparently because of the symlinks.
• Therefore when it talks about using GH actions it meant explicitly setting it to GHA, not using the default GH Pages deploy action.

I'm still getting failures which can be prevented by removing symlinks. It looks like GH has decided that it doesn't like them much. Attempting to explicitly use the actions which GH provides for deployment of pages just gives me more explicit error message Error: Artifact could not be deployed. Please ensure the content does not contain any hard links, symlinks and total size is less than 10GB. (Run)

[MetRonnie]

Error: Artifact could not be deployed. Please ensure the content does not contain any hard links, symlinks and total size is less than 10GB. (Run)

What workflow is that? It should just be a built-in workflow called "pages-build-deployment" which doesn't have a problem with symlinks on cylc-doc's gh-pages branch

[wxtim]

What workflow is that? It should just be a built-in workflow called "pages-build-deployment" which doesn't have a problem with symlinks on cylc-doc's gh-pages branch

https://github.com/wxtim/rose/actions/runs/5940627765/job/16109634884 fails in an unhelpfully mysterious manner.

They jekyll build fails with github-pages 228 | Error: No such file or directory @ rb_check_realpath_internal - /github/workspace/doc

[wxtim]

Supplanted by #2722