Markbind: Explore different services for previewing PR

[raysonkoh]

Is your request related to a problem?
If a PR has updated the docs, such as the userGuide, there is currently no convenient for a PR reviewer to review the changes made unless he/she pulls the PR and reviews the changes locally.

Describe the solution you'd like
Some initial work done to evaluate different PR preview services based on cost and ease of setup.

Can reference how Reposense used Surge for their deployments in reposense/Reposense#1099

Describe alternatives you've considered

None

Additional context
I believe that previously, Netlify PR preview was used for Markbind and we stopped using it because it was too expensive. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[ang-zeyu]

@raysonkoh thanks, @yamgent got us on the open source plan a while back ( https://github.com/MarkBind/markbind/pull/956 ) 😄

[ang-zeyu]

there's 1000 build minutes per month; it should be more than enough as well since we're only using it for the pr previews (deploys are done with travis - pending switch to gh actions)

[ang-zeyu]

I may have jumped the gun a little here though - do let me know if there's anything you're suggesting here that netlify dosen't support currently.

On the same lines there's #1212 which we can explore for visual UI review / testing (though not too sure about the pricing, etc. there)

[damithc]

It would be good to provide instructions for _other ways of doing PR previews_, for other potential users of MarkBind? Netlify may not be an option for them due to various reasons. RepoSense is an example. They ran out of free minutes too fast and had to look for an alternative.

[raysonkoh]

Some updates on this issue:

After referencing Reposense's configs for doing PR previews with Surge.sh, I am able to come up with a Github-Actions workflow that works for a PR that is sent from a branch of the same repo.

I see from the discussions in reposense/Reposense#1105 that there were some concerns when a PR is sent from a branch of a forked repo, as Github Actions may not expose the repo secrets. I will investigate this further.

Side note: Surge also supports deploying to a custom domain. Should we explore this as a possible method of deploying a Markbind site?

Some alternative services that I have found that may support PR Previews (need to do more research into whether they actually work with Markbind):

• AWS Amplify
• Heroku Review App
• Gitlab Review App

[damithc]

Good progress @raysonkoh

Side note: Surge also supports deploying to a custom domain. Should we explore this as a possible method of deploying a Markbind site?

GitHub pages can do that as well. So, I think we can let the platform handle that part i.e., if the user want to deploy to a custom domain, they can refer to the documentation provided by the platform

[ang-zeyu]

For reference, the usage as of 24th feb for this month

We're really no where near exceeding the limit. Reposense has a relatively long ~10min ci deploy run due to its tool chain (ours just takes about ~1min 30s)

[raysonkoh]

Some updates while I was exploring using Heroku for PR previews / deployment:
In terms of deploying a Markbind site via Heroku, it may not be very feasible. On a free heroku account, there are a limited number of minutes per month which the website can be actively serving users (at most 1000 hours). Also the website will go to sleep if it has been inactive for more than 30minutes.

For PR previews, I think it is possible with the use of Heroku review apps, but it is quite restrictive and inconvenient. On a free heroku account, there can be at most 5 apps created (i.e. at most 4 pull requests can have PR previews). Even with a paid account, there is an upper limit of 100 apps created (i.e. at most 99 pull requests can have PR previews). Also, heroku does not automatically create review apps for pull requests from forks. So someone with access to the heroku account has to manually create a review app manually every time a PR is sent from a fork, which can be quite inconvenient.

[damithc]

Thanks for investigating the Heroku option @raysonkoh
We can put that on hold for the time being.