Host the website a little differently

[sidvishnoi]

Presently, we use GitHub pages based deployment to deploy the website. There's no automatic way to build & validate the spec along with it. The deployment previews are done via Netlify, but the production site is hosted via GitHub pages (artifact based workflow).

If we move site site hosting to Cloudflare ¹, we can improve things a bit. Plan:

• Host static website on Cloudflare.
• Setup deploy previews via Cloudflare as well, and remove Netlify dependency.
• We can get staging env setup more easily as everything belongs within Cloudflare.
• Use w3c/spec-prod GitHub action for managing spec deployments.
  • This will deploy the spec on GitHub pages.
  • We will add a route rule in Cloudflare such that /specification/* is proxied to GitHub pages.
  • With spec-prod, we get spec validation on every PR that touches spec.
  • We won't have to manually update spec builds ²,
    • and GitHub actions rule ensure the spec is published only when there's a change to the spec, not on changes to other parts of website, keeping spec changes better listed in git (as spec-prod deploys to gh-pages branch instead of artifact).
  • Rename specification-respec.html to index.html so dev builds and Cloudflare deploy previews can still preview the ReSpec document on /specification, even if it's not built.
  • https://wicg.github.io/webmonetization can then belong to specification only (if wanted), and https://webmonetization.org/ can be for entire website include the spec.

Footnotes

1. or we can use Netlify, but publisher-tools are hosted on Cloudflare, so makes sense to use Cloudflare here as well. Also, the "rules" in Cloudflare let us manage the hosting better than Netlify. ↩

2. https://github.com/WICG/webmonetization/pull/458#issuecomment-2175754988, https://github.com/WICG/webmonetization/pull/520#discussion_r2037049374 ↩

[bosbaber]

I think in principle this is a fine plan, but if we do a revamp, we have to try and git a couple of other goals at the same time.

I'm in the process of trying to consolidate our infrastructure using Infrastructure As Code. If I were to do this deployment you described above using GCP instead of CloudFlare I can have this up and running probably in a day. If we stick with CloudFlare it will take a little bit longer because I will have to do the integration.

The secondary goals I would like to hit is

• Consolidation of infrastructure creation strategy using Infrastructure As Code
• Application deployments using GitHub Action pipelines like described above
• Everything hosted using CDN

I'm just gathering all the context and will update here tomorrow morning.

[bosbaber]

After discovering more context and talking to some people I realised that my dream of consolidating everything into GCP is not viable for the moment. So I completely endorse the proposed plan above. Will help spawn and implement related tasks.