Build HTML preview of RO-Crate

Overview

This action builds an html preview page from an RO-Crate metadata file.

It can be used in conjunction with other GitHub actions in order to commit the files to your (e.g.) gh-pages branch, and then deploy to your github.io site.

Example workflow

• Put your ro-crate-metadata.json in the root directory of your repo.

• Create a file .github/workflows/ro-crate-to-ghpages.yml with the following contents:

  name: RO-Crate to GitHub Pages
  on:
    push:
      branches:
        - main
  jobs:
    build-and-deploy:
      runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
      concurrency: ci-${{github.ref}}
      steps:
        - name: Checkout
          uses: actions/checkout@v3
  
        - name: Build RO-Crate Preview
          uses: ResearchObject/[email protected]
  
        - name: Upload artifact
          uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v1
          with:
            # Upload entire repository
            path: '.'
  
        - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
          id: deployment
          uses: actions/deploy-pages@v1  
  

The action will run each time you push to the main branch.

The above workflow has steps to checkout your repo code, build ro-crate-preview.html, and commit this to the gh-pages branch. Note that this workflow will publish the whole of the repository "as-is" without any page rendering.

Specifying RO-Crate Root

By default this action looks for ro-crate-metadata.json in the root of the repository. You can override the path to the RO-Crate root by providing the crate_path argument:

      - name: Build RO Crate Preview
        uses: ResearchObject/[email protected]
        with:
          crate_path: crates/example4

The above will look for crates/example4/ro-crate-metadata.json and generate crates/example4/ro-crate-preview.html and the symlink crates/example4/index.html

Automatic commit

Instead of publishing the generated RO-Crate preview directly to GitHub Pages, you may prefer for the ro-crate-preview.html to be committed back into the main branch. In this way the preview will also become part of any releases and downloads, such as Zenodo DOI deposits from GitHub releases.

name: Generate RO-Crate preview
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    concurrency: ci-${{github.ref}}
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Build RO-Crate Preview
        uses: ResearchObject/[email protected]
              
      - name: Commit RO-Crate Preview
        uses: swinton/[email protected]
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}        
        with:
          files: |
            ro-crate-preview.html
            index.html
          commit-message: |
            Updated RO-Crate preview

Note: One downside of this approach is that every push of commits to GitHub will cause an additional commit back to the repository, which means you will need to use git pull to merge your local changes more frequently.