How to see the GitBook build status?

[das-g]

Issue description

Sometimes the tutorial content on https://tutorial.djangogirls.org/ falls out of sync with the content of this repo's master branch for much longer than the GitBook build and deployment should take. When that's the case, it'd be useful

1. to see whether a build and deployment was triggered at all
2. to see whether it went through
3. if not, to see at what step it failed and how / why (e.g. by seeing the build log and deployment log)
4. if the problem seems intermittent (and thus unrelated to the repo content), be able to trigger a rebuild without having to introduce a new (dummy) commit to the master branch

Is anything of that possible?

If yes:

• For whom? (Are any special permissions / roles required on GitBook or on GitHub)?
• How? (Where would one have to look? As far as I can tell, the GitBook builds and deployments are separate from the builds done on Travis CI, so the latter can only give an indication when the build fails due mistakes in the repo content, e.g. syntax errors, and re-starting builds on Travis doesn't cause re-deployment on GitBook.)

[ekohl]

I also just noticed that the latest version wasn't deployed yet but don't know how it's actually deployed. From DNS we can see it's hosted by gitbooks.io:

$ dig tutorial.djangogirls.org
; ...
tutorial.djangogirls.org. 300	IN	CNAME	www.gitbooks.io.
www.gitbooks.io.	2622	IN	CNAME	cdn.gitbook.com.
cdn.gitbook.com.	2622	IN	A	95.85.1.232
; ...

I don't know who has a login there.

[magul]

I've just checked that and its last build was triggered on GitBook by this commit 10 days ago (Oct 25th). I have really difficulties to say why 10 days ago, as this commit is dated September 24th.

I'm in GitBook member of Django Girls organization, I don't really know what tier I belong to, but unfortunately, don't have access to rerun deployment process. I already asked @GirlGeekUpNorth on Slack to upgrade my membership there (after @aniav advice) and got an info to create a ticket for technical team to address it. I've just sent this ticket to Claire.

From a technical perspective we have (or at least I see it) a GitBook (Legacy) GitHub App installed (that's on organization level) and a webhook attached to the repository that pokes https://git.gitbook.com/github. I've just reviewed the whole history of this webhook and there's no successful instance. All that I checked ended with Service Timeout status.

We should probably investigate options to migrate either to current GitBook or move tutorial to other service? What do you think?

[magul]

I've just got a notification email from GtiBook that my book was updated (I have a clone of DjangoGirls tutorial on my account there) so they do accept updates, I've also checked that I don't have a webhook attached to my repository and have GitBook (Legacy) app installed so that's probably a way that we trigger deployments.

[magul]

In the meanwhile, we could use Travis and raw git feature to update GitBook from there.

I tried to do that from my local computer but my GitBook account does not have write access to this particular repo:

magul@bohr tutorial (master=) $ git push gitbook master
Username for 'https://git.gitbook.com': magul
Password for 'https://magul@git.gitbook.com': 
Enumerating objects: 222, done.
Counting objects: 100% (167/167), done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (85/85), done.
Writing objects: 100% (106/106), 83.77 KiB | 5.24 MiB/s, done.
Total 106 (delta 41), reused 40 (delta 11)
remote: error: failed to lock refs/heads/master
To https://git.gitbook.com/djangogirls/djangogirls-tutorial.git
 ! [remote rejected]     master -> master (failed to lock)
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://git.gitbook.com/djangogirls/djangogirls-tutorial.git'

[magul]

Even if CLI states that push was rejected the update occurs on their website:

That looks like a workaround that we can use but we should consider migrating to something else ASAP as this is pretty cheesy.

[das-g]

Even if CLI states that push was rejected the update occurs on their website:

That looks like a workaround that we can use

Most peculiar. 😕
👍 But for now, quite handy for us.

but we should consider migrating to something else ASAP as this is pretty cheesy.

Didn't we already have an issue about that? I can't seem to find it right now.

[magul]

Didn't we already have an issue about that? I can't seem to find it right now.

I believe the migration will be an outcome of this issue, as migration itself is just a means to resolve that particular problem (at least that's one way to probably address that issue).