Use GitHub Pages to publish web version of authoring tool + sample game(s)

[mkremins]

This would allow us to link people directly to the web version of the authoring tool, the Lovers & Rivals sampleGame, and maybe other examples as we add them.

The simplest way to do this is probably just to publish this whole repository as a GitHub Pages site, but that's kind of messy. Do we maybe want to try restricting Pages to a specific folder instead?

Either way, doing this would probably require us to either include bin/ensemble.js in the repo (so that the console knows where to find it) or include a vendored version of bin/ensemble.js in the ensembletool directory like we're currently doing with the sampleGame.

We could also move the examples (and authoring tool?) out of this repository altogether, although that'd mean more work for us to keep everything in sync between multiple repos.

[mkremins]

As of 6dd07ee, all of the internal "mini-projects" in the repo have their own jslib folders containing all the library files on which they depend. For ensembletool, this includes a built version of ensemble.js. Note that the tests still don't have their own built version of ensemble.js (instead relying on the transient one in the .gitignored build directory), although we could easily modify the build process to change this if we wanted to.

If we published the whole repo as a GitHub Pages site today, we'd have the following URLs:

• https://ensemble-engine.github.io/ensemble: A kind of weird/janky index page that contains instructions for how to run a local web server at the root of the repository and relative links to both the authoring tool and tests. We'd probably want to change this.
• https://ensemble-engine.github.io/ensemble/ensembletool: The browser version of the authoring tool. No support for file I/O yet (see Support file I/O in browser version of authoring tool #109).
• https://ensemble-engine.github.io/ensemble/examples/loversAndRivals: The Lovers and Rivals example game. This should work just fine.
• https://ensemble-engine.github.io/ensemble/tests: A non-working version of the tests. We'd probably have to include a built version of ensemble.js in the tests/jslib directory as well if we wanted these to work, although we might not care whether the tests work as a public-facing webpage.

So this is kind of weird and I don't think we'd necessarily want to go ahead and do this at present. We probably need to sit down and figure out what we actually want to have as public-facing web content (both now and in the future) before we can make further progress in this direction.

[extinak]

I don't know if anyone is actively working on this anymore, but did you consider hosting at glitch instead? It may fit your needs better, although I assume you'd have to do it as a separate project.

Actually, where gitch probably fits your needs is a way of sharing a very basic template for what an ensemble-engine project looks like. Here's an example of a template for a generative language js library