What happened to GitLab for Documentation (similar FabAcademy)

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Our lab organizes IoT development training and challenges and we have so far been using an identical approach to the FabAcademy for documentation.
That means Markdown + CI/CL for hosting of the documentation pages.

We use docs for judging on one side and creation of participants portfolios and have been managing it within the free tier (10Gb) until 2021.

Since last year things have really gone lockdown in Gitlab and our participants (poor kids) have to submit Credit Cards to get a Gitlab account.

Anybody knows an alternative provider for similar workflow? We dont mind paying a fee for services but cannot be priced like professional developement studios etc.

Thanks for your thoughts
Theo

(I wished Fiore was still around for this question)

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Hi Theo, I’m sorry to hear this. Please consider the following recommendations as an alternative to your current setup:

  1. I’ll suggest Github pages, I have a mirror of my FabAcademy repository there, and I’m also using CI/CD tools for MkDocs. It’s the same pipeline configuration as in Gitlab.

  2. Also, keep track of big binary files using GIT LFS standalone or using “lfs-folderstore”. This could help minimize your storage size by tracking big binaries using an alternative data storage service or even a Drive or DropBox Free account, and just use git for text files.

  3. Let me know if you need any help regarding the configuration process I’ll be pleased to assist you. My email is: antonio.anaya@internetofproduction.org

Using Github pages with fab repo:

I’ve prepared a repository with all the needed configurations to run a CI/CD for using MkDocs and GitHub actions it works just as the GitLab for our Fab Academy:

Repository link: https://github.com/kny5/fab_documentation
The page build: https://kny5.github.io/fab_documentation/

  1. GitHub FORK repository (Recommended option):
    • Press, Fork.
    • Repository name, student_name.

Screenshot_20230207_015122
Screenshot_20230207_0151221724×669 32.2 KB

  1. Enable GitHub Actions, go to Settings > Actions > General:

    • Actions and Permissions: select, “Allow user_name actions and reusable workflows”.

    • Workflow permissions: select, “Read and write permissions”.

  2. Edit repo content to trigger GitHub actions CI/CD.

    • git add some_file.txt
    • git commit -m "2023, first commit"
    • git push

  3. Enable Github Pages, add this configuration on the tab Settings > GitHub Pages:

    • Source: “Deploy from branch”.
    • Branch: gh-pages, / (root)
    • Press, Save.

Here you’ll see another page build following the instructions shown: https://medialab-prado-coder-dojo.github.io/fab_documentation/

Kind regards,

Antonio Anaya
Fab Academy 2021. (っ▀¯▀)つ
DevOps at internetofproduction[dot]org

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