I decided to experiment with adding an existing Runestone book on my Runestone test server.
but this just resulted in what appears to be the help page for rsmanage.
So I conclude that this method is perhaps no longer supported.
Since this book is now written in PreTeXt, I think the right approach is probably to first clone the book repository into the books folder, and then use the rsmanage build --ptx command?
When I tried doing it this way, I get quite a few PTX errors about exercises that lack a structure number, but the html build succeeds.
Course creation fails because the document id is httlacs and not thinkscpy, but if I rename the cloned folder from thinkcspy to httlacs and build httlacs, it seems to work OK.