This is my first post, and I published with help of GitHub Actions 👋

UPDATE 17-01-2021

I created this text having in mind the previous version of my page. Take the below pieces of information with a grain of salt. My page has now a different workflow file. Someday I'll create text about my current approach.

When I heard about GitHub Actions and what are for I decided that I will use them someday. In this text, I'll focus on how I created my workflow rather than explaining things. More about GitHub Actions you can read on their's documentation page.

That day the light bulb in my head lit up. With GitHub Actions, I can publish my blog and dev.to posts from the comfort of the terminal. The actions that I used to build and deploy the site are Gatsby Publish and TheActionDev for sending articles to dev.to.

This is my workflow *.yaml file:

name: Gatsby Publish

on:
  push:
    branches: publish

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: enriikke/gatsby-gh-pages-action@v2
        env:
          GATSBY_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GATSBY_API_TOKEN }}
        with:
          access-token: ${{ secrets.GATSBY_API_TOKEN }}
          deploy-branch: master
          gatsby-args: --prefix-paths
      - uses: ful1e5/TheActionDev@v2
        with:
          api-key: ${{ secrets.DEVTO_API_KEY }}
          directory: ./src/pages/posts/dev

My workflow works this way:

• whenever I push a new commit to the publish branch the Gatsby site is built and then deployed to the master branch

• also if the post is in ./src/pages/posts/dev it's sent as a draft or published to devto using its API (it depends on the attribute published in frontmatter)

• I needed to add an env variable to build environment. In my case, it's used by gatsby-source-github-api to sourcing repositories for the portfolio section. Acces-token input also has this key. It's used by Github Publish action to making changes in the repository.

Is it working? If so, right now you are reading this post whenever it's on my site or devto. I don't know everything about GitHub Actions and these actions itself but this article is a nice start to get to know them better. From this point, I'd like to thank the creators of these actions for helping me creating this workflow. And for the rest, if you have questions or suggestions don't hesitate to share it with me in the comment section.

Photo by Naveen Jack on Unsplash