Enable gitlab pages

[rokroskar]

There have been a few requests to enable GitLab pages on renkulab.io. We should figure out if this is something we can reasonably support or not. The main issue seems to be the issuing of custom domain certificates because we might run into throttling from letsencrypt.

[markrobinsonuzh]

I don't know what this means exactly, but if it helps that we make a contribution to the cost of the certificates, we can probably arrange that.

[RichardJActon]

I just wanted to draw some fresh attention to this issue with a couple of examples of how I've used gitlab/github pages on gitlab.com/github.com to serve static sites from Renku Projects.

• I Recently wrote a short ebook on the research data life cycle and working reproducibly, I used Renku & Quarto to do this and it is now served from gitlab.com here: https://hdbi.gitlab.io/data-management/hdbi-data-resource/
• This workshop on writing performantR code which I set up to allow participants to run from Renkulab: https://renkulab.io/projects/racton/performantR has a set of accompanying slides which are written in a markdown flavour and reference benchmark results that are a computed by a pipeline in the same project. In this case the slides were actually already being served from github not gitlab so I didn't bother to tweak the build for them.

The ability to generate pages which can serve reports or slides built from literate programming documents like Rmarkdown & Jupyter notebooks using tools like Posit's Quarto would be very useful for bioinformatic colleagues of mine working on data analysis projects in conjunction with bench scientists.

There are some pain points of the current workflow of using gitlab.com pages as suggested on the forum by @gavin-k-lee. In general we start with a private project shared within a group while we are working on preliminary analyses and only make it public once it is in a state suitable for wider distribution or we are about to publish paper that features the analysis. This can be done with gitlab pages but if you wanted to make use of for example issues to get feedback on the work then you and your collaborators would need gitlab.com accounts to see the pages and renkulab.io accounts to raise issues.

Configuring Repo mirroring is a bit fiddly I had to consult my own guide to doing it the second time I tired setting it up as I'd forgotten how to do it. Then there's setting up the CI/CD, and gitlab environment variables for PATs which is all quite a barrier to entry for a user less familiar with setting up automations on git hosting platforms.

It would be fairly simple to create project templates pre-configured to publish a Quarto websites/books from an RStudio or JupyterHub based sessions if pages could be served directly from the Renkulab gitlab. But this is not possible with gitlab.com mirroring without a number of extra manual configuration steps by the user.

[ciyer]

Thanks a lot for providing those details. One of the areas we would like to focus on in the coming months is letting users showcase their work from Renku, so getting use cases like this is very helpful.