[by @GiggleLiu ] Pluto static preview service

[fonsp]

This awesome idea by @GiggleLiu was moved here from #46 (comment)

I have a proposal that can be notebook deployment much easier for users. It requires writting a PlutoBot, whenever one pings it in an issue like:

@PlutoBot https://link/to/xxx.jl [category="widget"]

A PR (with the notebook link) will be submitted to the PlutoHub. After automatic merging, an html page will be generated and link will be commented under the issue. People can use that link to preview the notebook.

Meanwhile, we can create a category "widgets" to encourage people to share their own widget (I dream about this feature for long).

[fonsp]

Hey @GiggleLiu, this is a FANTASTIC idea, which is why I have turned this into its own discussion board.

[fonsp]

About github integration

This is an awesome idea, I can already imagine lots of use cases.

We can also do this automatically, for any PR that edits a notebook file. This would be similar to netlify: for every commit in a PR, it creates a "deploy preview". (Examples are the github action runs in this branch: fonsp/Pluto.jl#811 ) In this case, you would need to install the pluto preview github action/app.

[fonsp]

About a "Pluto preview service"

I actually discussed a general “static Pluto preview service” recently with @aviks and @mbauman from juliacomputing, then might be able to host it on juliahub. But your suggestion to run it on github CI has advantages.

[fonsp]

Let's make website?

I like your category idea, which actually makes me think that this would also work really well as a website. There, you could upload notebooks by dragging&dropping, and you choose popular categories with checkboxes.

If it’s a web site, then you could also browse notebooks (with visual previews, we can render those with puppeteer). Of course, voting for popular notebooks would be great, but then it becomes a whole new project.