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thechiselgroup / biomixer

BioMixer
http://bio-mixer.appspot.com/
16 stars 13 forks source link

GitHub Pages as Demo Homepage #478

Closed everbeek closed 9 years ago

everbeek commented 9 years ago

I looked into using Github to host the app, and it worked out. It is not clear if it is worthwhile to host the production version from here, but this is a good option in comparison to using the AppEngine for simply hosting static client side files.

I am also going to look into the possibility that we actually want the compiled Javascript committed in the regular branches, so that all versions can be run over time. That is how the project would be if it weren't a Typescript project, so in that light it is not a matter of "committing binaries" that we are often warned against. If I do this, I can set the landing page up to point at specific commits or tags, or even to write javascript in to access specific tags via Github API, and create dynamic links using those. I can have a cutoff if I don't want really old demo version tags having links.

This is a really good idea, because it could be even more convenient than checking out older commits to see if bugs are present. Ya, I love this idea!

It would approximately double the size of commits, and potentially create confusion if a developer edited the js files rather than the ts files. Checking to see what URLs for specific commit runnable files would look like...

everbeek commented 9 years ago

Ach, I cannot serve from the repo like that. The gh-pages are designed to allow it, and hotlinking is essentially disabled for regular branches. The work around site, rawgit.com, only allows small time access, or with the CDN version, permanently cache files.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8779197/linking-files-directly-from-github/24425890#24425890 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17341122/link-and-execute-external-javascript-file-hosted-on-github

I have to think about it a bit more. Not that the rawgit one won't work at the moment, because I haven't committed js files yet.

Also, using the non-CDN one costs the host of rawgit money. I wouldn't want to publish links via that to the BioMixer front page necessarily...maybe I don't need access to all old versions after all. I wish github allowed hotlinking to repo files. Then again, if I only reference tags with the CDN version, things would be fine. I can control what tag releases are exposed on the project website. Thinking...

everbeek commented 9 years ago

It works fine with the gh-pages approach I am currently using, and it isn't very necessary to make things more flexible at this time. Closing.