Deploy insiders with Cloudflare pages

[snjallingur]

Hi,
we have purchased a license of insiders. A great addition for sure!
Our process is to deploy mkdocs through Cloudflare. So in our repro we have a requirement.txt file with all the pip modules to deploy. How should my requirements file look like?
I guess

mkdocs-material==9.5.3+insiders.4.49.0

will not work?

[alexvoss]

Hi, thanks for sponsoring! The publishing guide recommends to install via

pip install git+https://${GH_TOKEN}@github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material-insiders.git

Check out the full example given on how to set this up and how to get the GH_TOKEN from your secrets.

[snjallingur]

Thanks for the reply. I actually found a 3rd party guide for deploying through Cloudflare. Then I was experiementing with pip freeze which revealed something like

mkdocs-material @ git+https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material-insiders.git@somegeneratedstring

was hoping this would be enough. However, github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material-insiders.git is not available at the moment?

[kamilkrzyskow]

The insiders repository is available to sponsors: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/
You either need to use an access token in that git+... part as Alex said above, or use an account with granted permissions in your Git client to access the repository.
For automated deployments the token fetched from the secrets would be easier for sure: https://www.starfallprojects.co.uk/projects/deploy-host-docs/deploy-mkdocs-material-cloudflare/#deployment
So you need to use a separate command to install mkdocs-material from Insiders, as your requirements.txt probably won't process the ${GH_TOKEN} part. However, you could also stick to the requirements.txt but pre-process it during deployment with replacing some placeholder with the actual token from the secrets.

Also the @somegeneratedstring part refers to a commit hash to lock the version.

[alexvoss]

It is possible to include GH_TOKEN in requirements.txt by using ${GH_TOKEN}. Just came across this while searching for what would have been a more convoluted solution.

[kamilkrzyskow]

Oh wow, so text files do process variables now, or pip does it in this instance 😵‍💫😲 I'm impressed with the advancements in technology.

[alexvoss]

I think it will be the next big thing after all that AI hype ;o)

[snjallingur]

I simply added

git+https://[email protected]/squidfunk/[email protected]

to the requirements.txt file and now it is building fine. I guess the reason it didn't work earlier was because of the repository being unavailable (got a 404 error when running the pip install command).

Thanks for contributing.
I will mark this issue as resolved.

[alexvoss]

I would recommend keeping the secret out of the requirements.txt as a matter of good practice. Replace it with ${GH_TOKEN} and make sure to have the token in the environment variable. If you are running CI then this should come out of the appropriate secrets collection. If you are running locally you can add it to a shell startup script or modify a virtual environment to set/unset it as you enter/exit the environment. (I did that but was using too many short-lived venvs to make this viable).