Procedure: Migrate to native Pages deployment and delete gh-pages branch

# Procedure: Deploy and clean up gh-pages branch Follow these steps after PR #499 is merged to complete the migration to native GitHub Pages deployment. ## Pre-requisites - [ ] PR #499 merged to main ## Step 1: Change GitHub Pages source 1. Go to **Settings → Pages** in the repository 2. Under "Build and deployment", change **Source** from "Deploy from a branch" to **"GitHub Actions"** 3. Save ## Step 2: Trigger a test deployment Create a publish tag to trigger the updated workflow: ```bash git checkout main git pull origin main git tag publish-2026mar26-test git push origin publish-2026mar26-test ``` ## Step 3: Verify deployment - [ ] Check the Actions tab — the publish workflow should complete successfully - [ ] Verify the `github-pages` environment shows the deployment in the repo's Environments page - [ ] Visit https://python-programming.quantecon.org/ and confirm the site loads correctly - [ ] Spot-check 3+ lecture pages to verify content renders properly - [ ] Verify release assets (tar.gz, checksum, manifest) are attached to the release - [ ] Verify the notebook sync step completed (check lecture-python-programming.notebooks repo) ## Step 4: Verify linkcheck still works Either wait for the weekly scheduled run, or trigger manually: 1. Go to **Actions → Link Checker [Anaconda, Linux]** 2. Click **Run workflow** (workflow_dispatch) 3. Verify it completes and correctly downloads/extracts the Pages artifact ## Step 5: Delete the gh-pages branch Once everything above is confirmed working: ```bash # Delete remote gh-pages branch git push origin --delete gh-pages # Delete local gh-pages branch (if it exists) git branch -D gh-pages 2>/dev/null || true # Clean up local references git remote prune origin ``` **Expected space savings:** ~300MB reclaimed from the repository (153 deploy snapshot commits from Oct 2020 – March 2026). Note: Team members who have cloned the repo should run: ```bash git fetch --prune git branch -D gh-pages 2>/dev/null || true git gc --prune=now ``` ## Rollback procedure If the native deployment fails and the site goes down: 1. Re-create the gh-pages branch from the last known good deploy: ```bash git checkout fc6487c # latest gh-pages commit (March 20, 2026 deploy) git checkout -b gh-pages git push origin gh-pages ``` 2. Change Settings → Pages source back to "Deploy from a branch" (gh-pages / root) 3. Revert PR #499 on main