Automating versioning

We are now ready to integrate sphinx-multiversion into our automated deployment workflow. You probably want to release a new version of your documentation when you’ve released a new version of your API.

We’ll modify our existing workflow so that it runs on a release, and uses sphinx-multiversion to generate and publish your latest release’s documentation (find the completed file here):.

Open up .github/workflows/docs.yaml. First, modify the workflow trigger so that it runs on a new release:

on:
  release:
    types: [published]

Since we need to display the content of other git branches and tags, we need to have all history available. On the step of checking-out our repo, configure the Checkout V3 action to fetch all history for all branches and tags:

- uses: actions/checkout@v3
  with:
    fetch-depth: 0

As expected, you need to install sphinx_multiversion in Install dependencies step:

- name: Install dependencies
  run: |
    pip install -e .
    pip install sphinx furo sphinx_multiversion

Next, modify the step Sphinx build to use the sphinx_multiversion command to build your documentation:

- name: Sphinx build
  run: |
    sphinx-multiversion docs docs/_build/html

In the previous chapter, we saw how we need to have a landing index.html page to redirect visitors of our website to the main branch. We need to include this logic in our workflow. Copy the logic of index.html to a file called gh-pages-redirect.html under docs/_templates/ and commit it to your main branch. This way we ensure we have a template ready to be copied every time we regenerate our docs with the action.

# from the project root
cp ./docs/_build/html/index.html docs/_templates/gh-pages-redirect.html
git add docs/_templates/gh-pages-redirect.html
git commit -m "Add a template for gh-pages-redirect"
git push origin main

Then add another step to your action to create an index.html:

- name: Create index.html
run: |
    cp docs/_templates/gh-pages-redirect.html docs/_build/html/index.html

The updated “Publish Sphinx Documentation” GitHub Action using sphinx-multiversion

Your file .github/workflows/docs.yaml should now look like this:

name: Publish Sphinx Documentation

on:
  release:
    types: [published]

jobs:
  publish_sphinx_docs:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: write
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v3
        with:
          python-version: "3.10"
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: |
          pip install -e .
          pip install sphinx furo sphinx_multiversion
      - name: Sphinx build
        run: |
          sphinx-multiversion docs docs/_build/html
      - name: Create index.html
        run: |
          cp docs/_templates/gh-pages-redirect.html docs/_build/html/index.html
      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          publish_branch: gh-pages
          github_token: {% raw %}${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}{% endraw %}
          publish_dir: docs/_build/html
          force_orphan: true

Now, commit your updated workflow to main:

# from the project root
git add .github/workflows/docs.yaml
git commit -m "Use sphinx-multiversion in docs action"
git push origin main

To test this, make a small change to docs/index.rst, commit and push it to main.

Welcome to Sphinxy's documentation!
===================================

Explore Sphinxy's documentation by browsing the different modules.

git add docs/index.rst
git commit -m "Update index doc"
git push origin main

From your repo’s GitHub page, hit the link “Create a new release”. From the tags dropdown menu, write down the next tag version to create v0.0.2. Write a brief description and hit Publish Release.

From the Actions tab on your repo’s GitHub URL, you should see that the Publish Sphinx Documentation workflow has kicked off. Inspect the job details to verify that sphinx-multiversion has run.

When the pages-build-deployment is done, refresh your GitHub Pages URL. You should see your update has taken place on the main version as well as v0.0.2 of your docs.

{: .hint } 🙌 You have now reached the 10-automate-versioning part of the tutorial. If not, check out that branch and gh-pages-10 branch for gh-pages and continue from there.

🎉 Congratulations! 🎉

We are done! We recommend you take a look at the Further reading section if you want to learn more about documentation generation.

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