Tag: ci

I use a lot of asciidoc these days for work documentation (and I love it) and I've been so happy that GitHub renders it when you view a repository in the web browser, just like it does for Markdown and ReStructuredText. BUT what GitHub does not do is render the image types that asciidoc does so even though I'm working with asciidoc and PlantUML, and the asciidoc tools render those diagrams nicely in PDF and HTML output - GitHub's rendering doesn't. So here's a quick overview of how I handle those repositories.

I'm a big fan of docs-as-code for more or less any type of content publishing, but I'm less of a fan of Jekyll, the default tool used in GitHub pages. I also prefer ReStructuredText over Markdown as a markup format, so Sphinx is definitely on my shortlist of SSGs (Static Site Generators) for my projects. I recently switched the rst2pdf docs to using Sphinx hosted on GitHub pages, so here are my setup notes.

I come across a lot of "greedy" GitHub Actions, where automation is running across a whole project instead of only on the parts that are relevant. Examples might be code linters that report problems with documentation folders, or the inverse of that. It's especially problematic in monorepos where we probably want to use the same tool when we're doing the same task for different subfolders, but that tool might not make sense to run everywhere.

The joind.in projects are set up so that the build process runs on pull requests when they are opened, which is great! It means that contributors don't have to wait for one of the maintainers to look at it, only to reject the contribution on something that could be picked up automatically. I've had a few questions about the setup so I thought I'd share how it works.