Suggestion for improving deployment and development workflow

[jcfr]

Instead of leveraging GitHub pages, I suggest to consider integrating with netlify, this would have the advantage of giving you pull request preview deployment.

See https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/#deploy-preview-urls

[jcfr]

Additionally, this would avoid issue like the one described in #437

[floryst]

I like the approach with netlify, but glance.netlify.app is taken. Could go for kitware-glance. For now, publishing to github pages works, but deploy previews is a nice feature that can be added without taking away from github page primary deployment.

[jcfr]

The fact glance.netlify.app is taken doesn't really matter for the following reasons:

• netlify url is used explicitly in pull request deploy review but the link is automatically posted
• a custom URL would be associated with the production deployment
• the netlify project can be updated to use any name independently of where the source are located

That said, it may be worth thinking on how to discriminate between version of glances. It looks like having URLs like these may be sensible:

https://glance.kitware.com/stable/
https://glance.kitware.com/nightly/

or

https://glance.kitware.com/app/stable/
https://glance.kitware.com/app/nightly/

This would likely be more consistent and less confusing than the current scheme:

https://kitware.github.io/Glance/app/
https://kitware.github.io/Glance/nightly/

Other ideas ...

It may be sensible to also move away from the nightly term and instead have the term dev. (My understanding is that nightly is deployed each time the main branch is updated).

That said, I am not even sure having stable and nightly makes sense. I would argue that the main branch should always be considered as stable.

Now if you are considering actively working on cutting edge version (e.g 5.x) while maintaining a stable version (e.g 4.x), you could consider having https://glance.kitware.com/4.x (or similar) ...

To conclude you will have to evaluate the pros/cons of maintaining multiple versions

[floryst]

+1 I'll definitely go with adding the deploy previews.

I also consider just dropping the nightly/stable distinction, since it's difficult to say when "stable" should be updated. (Side note: nightly is equivalent to master as of now.) I won't yet go down the route of versioned URLs, since those who need to seriously use Glance can set up their own build of Glance.

[floryst]

If we choose to support glance.kitware.com, then I would toss out stable/nightly entirely. Do we have other projects using *.kitware.com subdomains?

[jcfr]

Do we have other projects using *.kitware.com subdomains?

slicer-packages.kitware.com
data.kitware.com
viame.kitware.com
...