WEB: Deployment of the new website in production

[datapythonista]

Until now, we've been deploying the website manually afaik, from the separate repo.

What I would do with the new website is next (open to discussion):

• Have a job running to automatically deploy the website from master, possible frequencies:
  • Every commit
  • Daily
  • Weekly
• Build the website normally, as we do in https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/blob/master/azure-pipelines.yml#L122
• Deploy it to the server with rsync, something like: rsync avz --delete --exclude="docs" ~/web/build pandas_ci@pandas.io:/var/www/pandas

For the docs, I see two main options:

• Inside docs/ have a directory per language (currently English), and inside them one per version (with a symlink stable/ -> 0.25.1), so the urls would be something like pandas.io/docs/en/stable or pandas.io/docs/en/0.24.0 (and redirect pandas.io/docs/ to pandas.io/docs/en/stable)
• Copy the docs directly in pandas.io/docs/ and keep the old version in directories there pandas.io/docs/0.24.0/

In both cases, we can deploy the master docs into a dev/ directory together with the versions.

I think the first option is a bit simpler to maintain, and the second makes the url a bit simpler. I don't have a strong preference.

I think this is very simple, but requires that all pages that we don't want to version are in the web, and not in the docs. So, if the roadmap is in the docs, the version we will have will be the stable version (0.25.1) and not master.

@jorisvandenbossche you proposed to have the next pages in the docs:

• Roadmap
• Ecosystem
• Contributing to pandas

Do you have a proposal for how to serve or deploy these? Or are you ok having the stable version of those? I thought about it, and I couldn't find any option I liked to keep those in the docs, that's why I'm proposing to move them to the website.

[WillAyd]

Why do we want to deploy daily from master? I feel like that might add a maintenance burden for not a lot of gain

[jorisvandenbossche]

Why do we want to deploy daily from master? I feel like that might add a maintenance burden for not a lot of gain

Currenlty, Tom builds the website manually and uploads it, which means even more burden (for him) + it often does not happen directly after a change.
So automating this makes sense to me?

[jorisvandenbossche]

@datapythonista in the daily deploy, this can also include the dev docs? (similar to a version: pandas.io/docs/en/dev/)

[WillAyd]

I'm mostly concerned about the frequency. Pushing daily changes to a live production documentation system seems like an easy way for mistakes in our development process to impact people trying to use the documentation in the day to day

[datapythonista]

@datapythonista in the daily deploy, this can also include the dev docs? (similar to a version: pandas.io/docs/en/dev/)

Forgot to add it, but that's surely an option, and I'm happy about it.

I'm mostly concerned about the frequency.

I'm ok with weekly too. But couple of comments to consider:

• Personally, if I change something to the website, I'd like to see it life not long after.
• The stable documentation will only be updated when releasing, so shouldn't be affected
• I think rsync should be quite harmless, if something is broken, it simply won't update
• If we deploy weekly, when we discover that something wrong has been deployed, we will probably fix it manually. With daily deployments, I think we can just merge the fix into master, and wait.

[jorisvandenbossche]

I'm mostly concerned about the frequency.

We will typically not change the website very often (at least not daily), but if we do, we want to have it live quickly (eg for announcing a new release).
So to have it practical, that means that the automatic update should be done either on each commit (if the web sources are touched, which can be less than daily) or on a regular basis such as daily.

[TomAugspurger]

+1 for continuously deploying it whenever the web stuff is touched.

[datapythonista]

+1 for continuously deploying it whenever the web stuff is touched.

After a second thought, also +1 on this (immediate fixes, and the CI will be simpler with a single job for all). And if for whatever reason this causes troubles, it should be very easy to change the frequency.

Updated the description to show the different options.

[jorisvandenbossche]

One problem with this "whenever web stuff is touched" is that this heuristic does not work for the dev docs. Currently (for github pages) you first copy website and docs to a single directory, and then rsync both together. But I suppose they can also be rsynced separately? (and then the dev docs on each commit? that's maybe a bit too much?)

[TomAugspurger]

Let's just deploy each commit then :)

[datapythonista]

I'd run the rsync after every merge to master, we're building the web and docs already. So it's just adding the rsync command, that in most cases won't have much to synchronize.

I think I don't get what you have in mind. Does what I propose make sense?

[jorisvandenbossche]

Not sure it fits on this issue, but it has to do with deployment of the docs, so posting here (but can also open a new issue).

Now we are starting to use the new deployed web/docs publicly, we still need to decide on a url scheme.
(for example, Tom used links to https://dev.pandas.io/docs/ in the rc announcement, and Marc used https://pandas.io, which has links to https://pandas.io/docs/ on twitter. While I think long term none of both links to the docs are meant to stay?)

I think there are two parts (base url vs doc url scheme), and so the first question is:

Which base url do we use? (pandas.pydata.org vs pandas.io)

• I am not sure we actually ever discussed this, apart from some varying assumptions (eg I assumed we would use the new one, and I think Tom assumed we would keep the old). So let's make this more explicit.
• Technical question: if we would like to keep pandas.pydata.org, is this actually possible combined with the new hosting?
• If we go with the new one (pandas.io), how do we deal with all existing links online?
  • For older versions of the docs (the ones linking to eg https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/version/0.25/), we can probably keep alive? (but how long?)
  • For the links to "stable", we need redirects? And the same for the pandas.pydata.org website? Is this possible?

And a second question (although only applicable if we go with a new base url): what url scheme for the docs to use?
I assume we want something like docs/stable/, docs/dev/ (instead of the docs/ right now), and then for new releases also add the docs/version/x.x/ pattern? Although for this last one, we might want to drop the "version" in it and just go with docs/x.x/ for shorter urls.