'production' and 'development' versions of Wiki

[maddie-m]

Often edits to documentation might warrant asking for input from others on the team for how something should be worded, for example. GitHub (& other Git hosters) can facillitate such a workflow through pull requests quite well. For example, one branch could be development (in progress, in practice, Otterwiki can continue pointing to 'main' branch). Pull requests can then be created to a production branch.

To follow this workflow, it would be nice to essentially have two Otterwiki websites: one writable and working completely as normal, and another which is a read-only, 'production' site. A realistic workaround at the moment is to just host a secondary mirror of the site which is set to auto-pull from the production branch and is set to view-only, but things like user accounts require some additional work, then (to have both versions of the wiki hidden behind a login and account approval).

This may be a bit niche, but I thought I would offer it up.

[redimp]

Hey @maddie-m, Thanks for the suggestion, I have thought about this workflow as well.

It would be nice, but there is a lot of complexity hidden in it, merging in
particular would be a nightmare to handle through the UI in a live system.
I did sketch out an approach based on git worktrees, but it is not on the
roadmap at the moment.

For what it is worth, the workaround you described is exactly what I run for
otterwiki.com today: a second instance pulling from a separate branch,
configured read-only. Works well in practice.

Leaving this open as a feature request and for discussion.

[maddie-m]

Totally understandable!

I was thinking about this some more today as I was setting up a second wiki to do this with. I set up a GitHub action to copy (using [copycat action]https://github.com/marketplace/actions/copycat-action), for anyone curious about doing it for themselves) the from the 'production branch' to the main branch of a secondary repo. This works well.

As a potentially more straightforward feature request, being able to specify a branch in the Repository Management settings would be handy (in this situation in particular, the benefit would be removing the need for two repositories). Since it seems that the repo management also pulls from 'main', it seemed to have issues with a repo which uses 'master' as primary ref (I did briefly test to see if it could pull from a GitHub git@github.com:user/repo.wiki.git from GitHub's wiki feature, but unfortunately, it uses master branch instead of main and does not seem to have a way of changing this, hence the secondary repo approach instead.) So, specifying branches through the web interface would also resolve that nicely at the same time.

(A plus PLUS would perhaps be a secret-advanced-console to directly interface with Git through the wiki's git configuration, for troubleshooting if something is wrong - for example, I ran into an error where it could not pull due to needing a --rebase flag, and fixing this was a bit of trouble, though I did get it worked out.)