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Is it possible to deploy Oxygen web author in an ephemeral Gitlab review app?

Posted: Wed Jun 26, 2024 1:30 pm
by aireilly
Gitlab has a nice feature called "Review apps" that allows you to do scratch builds for merge requests. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/

Instead of setting up a regular web server for Oxygen web author reviews that the entire team interacts with, is it possible to spin up an Oxygen web author review app in Gitlab that stays up for the life time of the merge request?

Once the merge request is completed, the Oxygen web author server gets destroyed. Each merge request would have it's own Oxygen web author review app server.

Thanks
Aidan

Re: Is it possible to deploy Oxygen web author in an ephemeral Gitlab review app?

Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2024 10:09 am
by cristi_talau
Hello,
One Web Author instance can work with multiple Git repositories and multiple branches. So you do not have to create and destroy a new deployment for each merge request.

To make it easier for users to go directly to the correct branch you can try to add a comment on the merge request that has links [1] that open these topics in Web Author . You have several options here:
  • Post a comment with links [1]
  • Post a comment with a link to a published WebHelp output that include Edit links on each page [2]
If you want to start a Web Author deployment when a merge request is created, you can automate the startup of Web Author (e.g. in a docker container: https://github.com/oxygenxml/web-author-docker ) . The only restriction is that all instances use the same license server.

I was curious why you think is better to start a dedicated instance for each merge request - I think it might be a misunderstanding. It would be great if you could share more details.

Best,
Cristian

[1] https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... bed%2Clink
[2] https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... am5_hbq_1z