Adding version dropdown to sphinx website Issue:#372

[Transyltooniaa]

Title: Automate Sphinx Documentation Deployment with Versioned Switcher

Description

What is this PR?

• Bug fix
• Addition of a new feature
• Other

Why is this PR needed?

addresses : #372
This PR enhances the Sphinx documentation deployment workflow for the forked datashuttle repository. It ensures that versioned documentation is deployed automatically whenever a new tag is pushed, and development builds (dev version) are properly handled. The new automation eliminates the need for manually updating switcher.json and the latest directory.

What does this PR do?

• Implements a GitHub Actions workflow that builds Sphinx documentation and deploys it to GitHub Pages.
• Ensures that non-development versions (i.e., tagged releases) are deployed into their respective version directories.
• Automatically updates switcher.json to include the latest version while maintaining previous versions.
• Ensures that the latest directory always points to the newest stable release.
• Prevents unnecessary redeployment of unchanged documentation files.

References

This PR is related to automating documentation deployment similar to the main repository:

• https://github.com/neuroinformatics-unit/datashuttle.git
• Forked repository: https://github.com/Transyltooniaa/datashuttle.git

How has this PR been tested?

• The workflow has been tested locally by pushing the code to a new branch with updated tags to ensure there is no error
• GitHub Actions workflow runs have been tested to ensure proper deployment behavior on both branch pushes and tagged releases.
• The latest directory correctly updates only when a non-development version is released.

Is this a breaking change?

No, this PR does not break any existing functionality. It only improves the automation of documentation deployment.

Does this PR require an update to the documentation?

No major changes to documentation are required, as this PR only affects the deployment process. However, contributors should be aware that manual updates to switcher.json and the latest directory are no longer needed.

Checklist:

• The code has been tested locally
• Tests have been added to cover all new functionality
• The documentation has been updated to reflect any changes
• The code has been formatted with [pre-commit](https://pre-commit.com/)

[Transyltooniaa]

I have implemented an automated GitHub Actions workflow for building and deploying Sphinx documentation with versioning. This ensures that each tagged release is correctly deployed, updates switcher.json dynamically, and maintains the latest version. I tested this on my fork of the repository, and the workflow executed successfully, handling versioning as expected.

Request you to please let me know what you want to verify in this.

[JoeZiminski]

Hi @Transyltooniaa thanks for this! It looks good, I need to double check with colleagues but I think the way to test this works is to merge it and see if we need to make any changes. Will double check! In the meantime please see some minor comments, cheers!

[Transyltooniaa]

Thanks, @JoeZiminski, for the code review. Apologies for the late response. I will incorporate the above suggestions in the next 2 days.

[Transyltooniaa]

Hey @JoeZiminski . I have made the changes as suggested after the code review. Please have a look at it and let me know if anything seems missing / inappropriate. Cheers ! 😅

[JoeZiminski]

Thanks @Transyltooniaa! This looks great, testing this will be a bit tricky I need to confer with a colleague the best approach, as this might require merging to main to check it works. So the actual merging may be a slow process as it makes sense to merge some other PRs first. Don't worry with respect to GSoC, the contribution is very useful so the date of merge does not matter. I will keep you updated anyways, thanks again!

[JoeZiminski]

Hi @Transyltooniaa thanks a lot for this, I will re-review but it looks good to me and I think any issues will only be apparent after testing in practice. I think this is as far as you can go with this without access to our CI system. I'll test this and merge ASAP, thanks!

[Transyltooniaa]

Thank you so much !

[JoeZiminski]

Hi @Transyltooniaa thanks again for this PR, in the end this logic was packaged into a central action that we will use instead to reduce code duplication. Thanks nonetheless for this contribution, it was useful to see all code relevant to the dropdown laid out like this.