Discussion: Doc rendering + hosting on PR

[SwayamInSync]

Opening this issue for discussion on doc building and rendering at PR time

The constraint is current actions used to deploy docs rely the Github pages setting of "Build And Deployment" to be set to "Github Actions". We can enable the doc building at PR time but a preview is not possible with this (AFAIK) because this requires to dump the build files in a branch and then host from there i.e. set "Build And Deployment" to "Branch".
As a workaround there are 3rd party actions integrated with services like Netlify, Surge.sh or Cloudflare that allow us to keep the current "Build And Deployment" settings and still able to host the files over a temporary URL, this requires some secret environment creation and integration into workflow.

The point of raising this discussion is to see if strength agrees for just building is enough then we are GTG right now (#53), but in case preview is demanded then the above mentioned setup would be required. Please let me know your thoughts and if there exists an even simpler way 😄

[SwayamInSync]

cc: @ngoldbaum @juntyr @melissawm

[melissawm]

For numpy itself and many other projects we use CircleCI - it's pretty simple and folks already know how to handle. If you prefer other hosting solutions I'd go with netlify for similar reasons (we use it for numpy.org, for example).

CircleCI config file for numpy: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/main/.circleci/config.yml

For example, for this PR numpy/numpy#30669 the preview of the docs build is here: https://output.circle-artifacts.com/output/job/49431f32-c594-4138-881e-329fa219282c/artifacts/0/doc/build/html/index.html

EDIT: Forgot to mention, but in any PR for which the docs building check is enabled (if you trigger it to be run on PRs here:

numpy-quaddtype/.github/workflows/build_docs.yml

Line 7 in de9d7e1

# pull_request:

) the artifact will be available in the actions page. The docs build will always be available as a zip file that you can download and check locally. So this would be the simplest path and would not require a 3rd party service.

[SwayamInSync]

Yes I agree, I am also happy with just doc-building during PR (the attached PR only do so for now)
I was wondering whether the hosting and preview is also desired and what can be the ways.