Build and publish on GitLab

If your documentation sources are hosted on GitLab, you can use GitLab CI/CD to build your documentation website and deploy it to GitLab Pages.

Enable GitLab Pages for the project. Open your project on GitLab, select Settings | General, expand the Visibility, project features, permissions section, and enable Pages.
In the writerside.cfg file, set the web-path parameter for images to img.
<ihp version="2.0"> <topics dir="topics"/> <images dir="images" web-path="img"/> <instance src="hi.tree"/> </ihp>
In the project root, create a file named .gitlab-ci.yml, where you will define your CI/CD pipeline.
The following sample pipeline will trigger on every push to the main branch in the repository. the pipeline builds, tests, and publishes documentation from the starter project, where the default module name is Writerside and the default instance ID is hi:
variables: INSTANCE: 'Writerside/hi' DOCKER_VERSION: 'XXX.YYYYY' # IS_GROUP: 'true' # Uncomment to build a group stages: - build - test - deploy build: stage: build image: registry.jetbrains.team/p/writerside/builder/writerside-builder:$DOCKER_VERSION script: - set -e - export DISPLAY=:99 - Xvfb :99 & - PROJECT_ID=$(echo $INSTANCE | cut -d'/' -f2 | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]') - ARTIFACT="webHelp${PROJECT_ID}2-all.zip" - /opt/builder/bin/idea.sh helpbuilderinspect -source-dir . -product $INSTANCE --runner gitlab -output-dir public - echo "Testing existence of $ARTIFACT..." - ls -la public - test -e public/$ARTIFACT artifacts: paths: - public/$ARTIFACT - public/report.json - public/$ALGOLIA_ARTIFACT expire_in: 1 week test: stage: test image: openjdk:18-jdk-alpine before_script: - apk add curl script: - cd public - curl -o wrs-checker.jar -L https://packages.jetbrains.team/maven/p/writerside/maven/com/jetbrains/writerside/writerside-ci-checker/1.0/writerside-ci-checker-1.0.jar - java -jar wrs-checker.jar report.json $INSTANCE dependencies: - build pages: stage: deploy image: ubuntu:latest before_script: - apt-get update -y && apt-get install unzip -y script: - PROJECT_ID=$(echo $INSTANCE | cut -d'/' -f2 | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]') - ARTIFACT="webHelp${PROJECT_ID}2-all.zip" - echo "Using artifact $ARTIFACT" - cd public - unzip -O UTF-8 $ARTIFACT dependencies: - build artifacts: paths: - public expire_in: 1 week
If necessary, set the correct values for environment variables:
INSTANCE
The name of the module and instance ID separated by a slash. The module name is the directory with writerside.cfg. It is designated by the icon in the Project tool window.
For example, the default module name in a starter project is Writerside and the instance ID is hi. So in this case, set the variable to Writerside/hi.
If you want to build multiple instances, set IS_GROUP: 'true' and make sure the INSTANCE variable points to the necessary build group.
Also, in this case, save the artifacts to path: artifacts/*.
DOCKER_VERSION
The version of the Writerside Docker builder to use for generating the documentation artifacts. The current latest version is 2025.04.8412.
When you update to a newer version of Writerside, set the new Docker builder version to ensure results similar to what you see in the local preview and local builds.
Commit the .gitlab-ci.yml and push it to GitLab.

Upload search indexes

If you also configure Algolia search, you can modify the CI/CD pipeline further and add the publish-indexes stage that will automatically update the search indexes after a successful deployment.

You will also need to add Algolia indexes to the public artifacts' folder that the build stage produces, and specify the following additional environment variables:

ALGOLIA_APP_NAME: Algolia application ID
ALGOLIA_INDEX_NAME: Name of Algolia index
CONFIG_JSON_PRODUCT: Help instance ID from the tree file or the value of the web-path attribute specified in writerside.cfg if it is different from the ID
CONFIG_JSON_VERSION: Help instance version (usually the same as the branch name) specified in writerside.cfg

Here is how it all looks in a single workflow file:

variables: INSTANCE: 'Writerside/hi' DOCKER_VERSION: 'XXX.YYYYY' # IS_GROUP: 'true' # Uncomment to build a group ALGOLIA_APP_NAME: 'V6MS25BRYB' ALGOLIA_INDEX_NAME: 'MY_INDEX' CONFIG_JSON_PRODUCT: 'HI' CONFIG_JSON_VERSION: '1.0' stages: - build - test - deploy - search build: stage: build image: registry.jetbrains.team/p/writerside/builder/writerside-builder:$DOCKER_VERSION script: - set -e - export DISPLAY=:99 - Xvfb :99 & - PROJECT_ID=$(echo $INSTANCE | cut -d'/' -f2 | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]') - ARTIFACT="webHelp${PROJECT_ID}2-all.zip" - /opt/builder/bin/idea.sh helpbuilderinspect -source-dir . -product $INSTANCE --runner gitlab -output-dir public - echo "Testing existence of $ARTIFACT..." - ls -la public - test -e public/$ARTIFACT artifacts: paths: - public/$ARTIFACT - public/report.json - public/$ALGOLIA_ARTIFACT expire_in: 1 week test: stage: test image: openjdk:18-jdk-alpine before_script: - apk add curl script: - cd public - curl -o wrs-checker.jar -L https://packages.jetbrains.team/maven/p/writerside/maven/com/jetbrains/writerside/writerside-ci-checker/1.0/writerside-ci-checker-1.0.jar - java -jar wrs-checker.jar report.json $INSTANCE dependencies: - build pages: stage: deploy image: ubuntu:latest before_script: - apt-get update -y && apt-get install unzip -y script: - PROJECT_ID=$(echo $INSTANCE | cut -d'/' -f2 | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]') - ARTIFACT="webHelp${PROJECT_ID}2-all.zip" - echo "Using artifact $ARTIFACT" - cd public - unzip -O UTF-8 $ARTIFACT dependencies: - build artifacts: paths: - public expire_in: 1 week search: stage: search image: registry.jetbrains.team/p/writerside/builder/algolia-publisher:2.0.32-3 dependencies: - build - test - pages script: - echo "Checking contents of the public directory..." - ls -la public - if [ -z "$ALGOLIA_KEY" ]; then echo "ALGOLIA_KEY is not set in Gitlab secrets"; exit 1; fi - echo "ALGOLIA_KEY is set" - PROJECT_ID=$(echo $INSTANCE | cut -d'/' -f2 | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]') - ALGOLIA_ARTIFACT="algolia-indexes-${PROJECT_ID}.zip" - echo "ALGOLIA_ARTIFACT is $ALGOLIA_ARTIFACT" - if [ ! -f "public/$ALGOLIA_ARTIFACT" ]; then echo "Artifacts file public/$ALGOLIA_ARTIFACT not found!"; exit 1; fi - unzip -O UTF-8 public/$ALGOLIA_ARTIFACT -d algolia-indexes - env "algolia-key=$ALGOLIA_KEY" java -jar /opt/builder/help-publication-agent.jar update-index --application-name $ALGOLIA_APP_NAME --index-name $ALGOLIA_INDEX_NAME --product $CONFIG_JSON_PRODUCT --version $CONFIG_JSON_VERSION --index-directory algolia-indexes/ 2>&1 | tee algolia-update-index-log.txt artifacts: paths: - algolia-update-index-log.txt expire_in: 1 week

Build to PDF

You can configure a separate pipeline or stage in an existing pipeline to produce a PDF artifact. Here is an example of a separate pipeline with a build_pdf stage that produces a PDF:

variables: INSTANCE: 'Writerside/hi' DOCKER_VERSION: '2025.04.8412' PDF: 'PDF.xml' stages: - build_pdf build_pdf: stage: build_pdf image: registry.jetbrains.team/p/writerside/builder/writerside-builder:$DOCKER_VERSION script: - set -e - export DISPLAY=:99 - Xvfb :99 & - PROJECT_ID=$(echo $INSTANCE | cut -d'/' -f2 | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]') - PDF_FILE="pdfSource${PROJECT_ID}.pdf" - HTML_FILE="pdfSource${PROJECT_ID}.html" - /opt/builder/bin/idea.sh helpbuilderinspect -source-dir . -product $INSTANCE --runner gitlab -output-dir public -pdf $PDF - echo "Testing existence of $PDF_FILE and $HTML_FILE" - test -e public/$PDF_FILE - test -e public/$HTML_FILE artifacts: paths: - public/$PDF_FILE - public/$HTML_FILE expire_in: 1 week

Last modified: 06 March 2025