Generate static deployment for GH Pages

[aganders3]

This PR sets up a static API deployment via GitHub Pages alongside the existing Vercel/NextJS API. The Vercel API will remain in place to allow testing and grace period, and api.napari.org will continue to point to the Vercel deployment for the time being.

Changes

API Routes:

• Renamed /api/conda → /api/conda-map to avoid route conflict with /api/conda/{plugin_name}
• Added rewrite in vercel.json so /api/conda still works (redirects to /api/conda-map)
• Added deprecation headers to /api/conda endpoint:
  • Deprecation: true
  • Link: </api/conda-map>; rel="alternate"
  • X-Deprecated-Message explaining the change
  • I don't expect anyone to notice or care about this

Static Deployment:

• Created scripts/prepare_gh_pages.py to generate static files from public/
  • Removes .json extensions to match API routes
  • Maps conda.json → conda-map and index.json → plugins
  • Nests everything under /api/ directory
  • Generates simple index.html homepage
• Updated CI workflow (.github/workflows/update.yml):
  • Runs after committing public/ changes (doesn't interfere with existing process)
  • On PRs: Uploads gh-pages as downloadable artifact for inspection (host it locally with python -m http.server -d ./gh-pages)
  • On main/scheduled: Deploys to gh-pages branch via peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v4

Known Limitations / Breaking Changes

When using the GitHub Pages API (not applicable to Vercel API):

1. No name normalization - File paths are served as-is without package name normalization (known, accepted limitation previously discussed). To be clear: the names are already normalized. What this means is that clients will need to normalize names before making requests. Previously the Vercel API will accept non-normalized names, normalize them, and return the endpoint info (manifest, for example) for a plugin that matches the normalized name. Sorry I feel like I am not explaining this properly at midnight.

2. Breaking change for /api/conda route - Moved to /api/conda-map to avoid conflict with /api/conda/{plugin_name}. The Vercel API maintains backward compatibility via rewrite, but the static API only serves /api/conda-map. This is a bummer, probably the biggest drawback here. TODO: update clients to use this new endpoint ASAP.

3. Files are served as text/plain instead of application/json - GitHub Pages serves files without extension as text/plain. This generally doesn't matter:

• Current Vercel API doesn't include a Content-Type header at all
• Most API clients (like the plugin manager) don't care about content-type they will just try to parse what they get
• Browsers will download files instead of displaying JSON when browsing directly to endpoints in Firefox or whatever, that's kind of a hassle but the hub is the human-readable version, and we could even make a little app that would show you the contents.

[vercel]

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
npe2api	Ready	Preview, Comment	Feb 12, 2026 4:35am

[DragaDoncila]

Honestly this all looks pretty simple and clean to me, I don't have many comments. Do we want to do anything before merge? @aganders3 I know you mentioned trying it with plugin manager possibly?

[DragaDoncila]

so I notice sometimes we append the path with no .json to dest_paths as well as with the .json suffix. Can you explain why that is? I guess api_dir is the pages that are actually going to be served, and gh_pages_dir is like... backup files? Why do we put them in there at all?

[aganders3]

It's really an attempt to provide some backward-compatibility, but perhaps we don't need it. I think it's really an accident that both https://api.napari.org/conda.json and https://api.napari.org/api/conda point to the same thing in the current implementation.

[aganders3]

I tried it with the plugin manager and it worked, but I need to make sure I'm not missing any functionality. I think this is pretty safe to merge in its current form though, and that should keep the static version up to date with the next.js API.

[aganders3]

I'm going to merge and we can iterate as-needed, since having this live will allow us to do some more/better testing.