Host a Website for Baseprint Document Successions

You can provide up-to-date web pages of Baseprint document successions by deploying BaseprintLens on your own website. BaseprintLens is a Single-Page Application (SPA) that:

• takes a Document Succession Identifier (DSI),
• retrieves data records of the corresponding Baseprint document succession from the Software Heritage Archive and GitHub,
• verifies the document succession data records are valid for the DSI, and then
• renders the document editions in the document succession as web pages.

Objective

You will deploy an independent BaseprintLens application website using GitLab Pages. From this new BaseprintLens application website, any website visitor can read up-to-date copies of any published Baseprint document succession.

Alternatives

While this tutorial focuses on using GitLab Pages, many other website platforms can host a Single Page Application like BaseprintLens. For example, lens.perm.pub is hosted on AWS S3 with CloudFront and Route53.

BaseprintLens generates dynamic HTML pages for document successions on-demand after retrieving the most recently archived revision. To generate static HTML pages and PDF files, you can use BaseprintPress. For an introduction, follow the Generate Pages from a Succession tutorial. Note that these static webpages will not be automatically updated if a new edition to a document succession is published.

Prerequisites

• A GitLab account

Steps

Step 0: Sign in

Sign in to gitlab.com.

Step 1: Fork

Click the Fork button in the upper right-hand corner at gitlab.com/perm.pub/baseprintlens. You must be signed in to see the Fork button. Then, change the project name, URL, slug, and description, and click Fork project.

Step 2: Build

In the left-hand menu of GitLab, for the new forked repository, click Build > Pipelines. Click the New Pipeline button and then, again, click a second New Pipeline button.

Step 3: Visit

In the left-hand menu of GitLab, click "Deploy > Pages". A new live site and deployment should be listed. Click on the Visit site button or the new automatically generated https://....gitlab.io URL.

Conclusion

You have successfully deployed a new independent BaseprintLens installation on a new website domain. Any website visitor can enter a Document Succession Identifier (DSI) into BaseprintLens to browse any published Baseprint document succession.

More Resources

• Documentation for GitLab Pages

Questions/Feedback

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact Castedo.