ASF Pelican feature branches

In 2019 Infra created ASF-Pelican as a structure and template for projects to use to build their websites, and for the ASF's own website.

In 2024, Infra moved from ASF-Pelican to the ASF Infrastructure Pelican Action GitHub Action to perform the same functions without being closely tied to BuildBot. The repository for this GHA is github.com/apache/infrastructure-actions/tree/main/pelican.

The material below is relevant to the older Pelican build system and the Pelican GitHub Action.

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For large changes to your project website it will often be necessary to make a preview feature branch, work on it with others, and stage the results so you can review them. Here is how to create preview/feature branches.

Note: useful information is available from GitHub on creating and deleting branches.

Creating a feature or preview branch

Replace feature with a name of your choice. You can have multiple feature branches, each with its own name and purpose.

From main create a preview/feature branch.

Building

After you make a commit to your preview/feature branch, the Pelican build should happen automatically. You will get an email sent to id@apache.org.

A successful build will be found at https://www-feature.staged.apache.org/.

Merging the branch into the trunk

Once your feature is complete, submit a pull request (PR) from preview/feature to main. Once the PR is merged the site updates to include the updated features.

GitHub has further information on merging branches.

Example

1. Create preview/bootstrap5

2. Work on preview/bootstrap5 branch to update bootstrap to version 5 with preview builds staged at https://www-bootstrap5.staged.apache.org/

3. Submit PR to merge preview/bootstrap back to main

.asf.yaml settings

These settings in your project's .asf.yaml file do the automatic staging of preview branches.

pelican:
  autobuild: preview/*
  target: asf-site
  theme: theme/apache
  whoami: main

staging:
  profile: ~
  autostage: preview/*