Issue With Automatic nb & word conversion

[hamelsmu]

@jph00 I found a serious issue with the notebook and word to blog conversion that I didn't notice before.

It turns out that a GitHub Action is also responsible behind the scenes for building your GitHub pages. As a security measure, an event triggered by one GitHub Action cannot trigger another GitHub Action.

This means something other than an Action has to make a commit to the repo to force a fresh page build. This means that after the automated system converts your files for you, you have to make some kind of change in your repo for the build to start.

I have no idea why I did not notice this before, and I am not sure if this is the result of a recent change ( but I couldn't find anything saying it was a recent change ).

The only remedy to this situation is to supply a secret in Actions with a personal access token which can authenticate as a user to make the last commit into the repo. I'm going to formulate a PR for this soon, just wanted to open an issue and let you know about this ASAP

[natikgadzhi]

Would that be fixed if instead of committing a _posts post, we'd build the website with jekyll build in the action instead?

[jph00]

I'm thinking maybe the best approach here is to fork or copy fast_template, and create a new project. fast_template wouldn't do the _word or _notebooks thing at all, but would just be the basics. The new project wouldn't use gh pages, but instead would entirely use gh actions. More complex, but way more flexible. What do think?

[hamelsmu]

@jph00 I think that is a very good idea, and makes 100% sense.

I really like this approach b/c the second project will allow us to use whatever plugins etc we want and add all kinds of cool stuff

[hamelsmu]

FYI I closed #21 which fixed this issue, in anticipation we might move to a different repo for actions. Feel free to reopen etc. if necessary

[hamelsmu]

One more thought came to mind - perhaps we host pre-built nbdev-powered GitHub Actions on so all the hackers out there can use this in their blogs even if they aren’t using our repo template, **in addition to** a repo template that uses these Actions to get started quickly with a theme we choose. I’m imaging the audience being fast ai students in your upcoming course. Some of which don’t care so much about personalizing the look of their blog and will use the “advanced template” and others that really care about making their blog look unique in which case they may leverage the official fastai Actions with the theme of their choice. This makes it possible for people to use the action with only one line of code rather than also having to copy over all the helper files in ‘_action_files’, for instance It’s possible to do this all from within the same repo and is only a subtle change in the way the code is organized. This is completely optional and just wanted to throw that option out there incase it is interesting.

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On Sat, Feb 1, 2020 at 8:34 PM Jeremy Howard ***@***.***> wrote: I'm thinking maybe the best approach here is to fork or copy fast_template, and create a new project. fast_template wouldn't do the _word or _notebooks thing at all, but would just be the basics. The new project wouldn't use gh pages, but instead would entirely use gh actions. More complex, but way more flexible. What do think? — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#20?email_source=notifications&email_token=AALKJEQP2XQQA2S7Q4I6BYDRAZEOZA5CNFSM4KOWZOMKYY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOEKRNPTQ#issuecomment-581097422>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AALKJEXHNSLLNG2X6DVX2QLRAZEOZANCNFSM4KOWZOMA> .

[jph00]

It would be great - I have no idea how to do it, but I'd love to learn :)

…

-- Jeremy Howard j@howard.fm

On Sun, Feb 2, 2020, at 12:34 PM, Hamel Husain wrote: One more thought came to mind - perhaps we host pre-built nbdev-powered GitHub Actions on so all the hackers out there can use this in their blogs even if they aren’t using our repo template, **in addition to** a repo template that uses these Actions to get started quickly with a theme we choose. I’m imaging the audience being fast ai students in your upcoming course. Some of which don’t care so much about personalizing the look of their blog and will use the “advanced template” and others that really care about making their blog look unique in which case they may leverage the official fastai Actions with the theme of their choice. This makes it possible for people to use the action with only one line of code rather than also having to copy over all the helper files in ‘_action_files’, for instance It’s possible to do this all from within the same repo and is only a subtle change in the way the code is organized. This is completely optional and just wanted to throw that option out there incase it is interesting. On Sat, Feb 1, 2020 at 8:34 PM Jeremy Howard ***@***.***> wrote: > I'm thinking maybe the best approach here is to fork or copy > fast_template, and create a new project. fast_template wouldn't do the > _word or _notebooks thing at all, but would just be the basics. > > The new project wouldn't use gh pages, but instead would entirely use gh > actions. More complex, but way more flexible. > > What do think? > > — > You are receiving this because you authored the thread. > Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub > <#20?email_source=notifications&email_token=AALKJEQP2XQQA2S7Q4I6BYDRAZEOZA5CNFSM4KOWZOMKYY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOEKRNPTQ#issuecomment-581097422>, > or unsubscribe > <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AALKJEXHNSLLNG2X6DVX2QLRAZEOZANCNFSM4KOWZOMA> > . > — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#20?email_source=notifications&email_token=AACUW53VLUQG3OX4VOULIGLRA4U35A5CNFSM4KOWZOMKYY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOEKSAHUA#issuecomment-581174224>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AACUW5YGM255DGPDLFNMQN3RA4U35ANCNFSM4KOWZOMA>.

[hamelsmu]

Absolutely, will love to start to work on it whenever you are ready!

Next steps could be: discuss the design of this somewhere perhaps in a google doc etc or we could start building it (or do both at the same time).

Some things we could discuss are:

• The workflow: ex: do we really want the magic commit message "/sync" to be required to kick off a build? Is it acceptable to trigger a page build on every push?
• What plugins do we want ( might be good for testing purposes to know )
• Are there any features that would be particularly useful for fastai students?
• What CSS to include? Perhaps we drop Primer and use something more lightweight that doesn't clobber other themes. We could, for example, borrow some of the css you are using for the docs sites that allow for the useful things like callouts and such. ( I think it is defined here).
• Ideas for tests: The only kind of tests I can think of is to kick off a jekyll build (without committing the build) and see if that provides an error - this might help catch errors on PRs to the template.
• What default theme do you want to use? Minima or something like lanyon ?
• etc

I suppose the thing we would need to get started is a new repo to send PRs etc. Really excited about this (and about the upcoming course and the book)

[hamelsmu]

Closing this issue b/c moved questions to this fastai - nbdev forum post