Separate website for each release

[mkonicek]

People often send pull requests which update both code and /docs which makes sense. However, when the PR is merged, the docs go live immediately but the code is only released in up to 4 weeks. This means the docs are inconsistent with the APIs and CLI commands people get when using React Native.

Here's an idea:

• https://facebook.github.io/react-native/0.13/docs/ are docs for the 0.13.0-stable branch
• https://facebook.github.io/react-native/0.12/docs/ are docs for the 0.12.0-stable branch
• https://facebook.github.io/react-native/master/docs/ are docs for master (current version)
• https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/ are docs for the latest non-rc branch (same as 0.12/docs)

We could have one per release (0.12.1, 0.12.2, ...) but that seems unnecessary.

The website is generated by Travis running the publish.sh script (see travis.yml) .

We could implement this by simply having subfolders in the static generated content: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/tree/gh-pages

[mkonicek]

@brentvatne, @ide Would you be interested in working on this?

I'll be available sporadically for about 3 weeks because of a conference and vacation, plan to work on this when I'm back unless someone picks it up.

[brentvatne]

I probably won't have time before the conference to do this but I agree that it's very important! This is a great task for someone looking to get their first contribution in. I'll send it out in the newsletter to see if anyone bites! :)

[yogurt-island-331]

@mkonicek would love to help out, but feel like I am not exactly sure what you meant, could you elaborate and let me know what specifically I can do to help?

[brentvatne]

@kevinzzz007 - short version: we want to build a different version of the docs for every tagged release of React Native, and make it possible to switch between those 😄

[yogurt-island-331]

@brentvatne that makes sense, since I'm pretty new to doing this, are there recommended approaches? Resources that would be helpful for me to read over for this task?

[brentvatne]

@kevinzzz007 - sorry I haven't done this before. You'll want to get familiar with the /website directory within react-native and how deployment to Github pages works.

[mihirsoni]

@brentvatne @mkonicek Could you just provide little more information how you would be expecting to generate.

I tried to modified the publish.sh with taking respective tag version from git describe of the each MR. would it be fine if we update that particular directory ?

[udnisap]

I will work on this. Quick questions

1. Do we need a navigation mechanism to navigate from different documentation sources?
2. Rather than building from the last build shall I build from all the branches with stable suffix? This will allow them to grow/update over time. but it will take few minutes to generate all the sources.

[mkonicek]

Do we need a navigation mechanism to navigate from different documentation sources?

Feel free to leave this out for now.

Rather than building from the last build shall I build from all the branches with stable suffix? This will allow them to grow/update over time. but it will take few minutes to generate all the sources.

Travis runs on each branch every time there's a commit so it's a good time to regenerate the website exactly for that branch at that moment. It would be very wasteful to regenerate the website for every branch on every commit to master, and it would get slower over time as we add more release branches.