AutoPublish on GitHub Pages with Github actions

GitHub pages are a great place to host the Demos and Personal Sites. But, often, you need to publish it by yourself.

Github Actions is a new Continuous Integration and Deployment solution from Github.

You can use GitHub Actions to deploy to GitHub pages on different events like

• Push to the main branch
• New Release created
• etc

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Let's take React app for an example.

Let's make a simple app with Create React App to list latest posts from dev.to

The main idea is of having a GitHub Action to build the app and deploy on GitHub pages.

Let's initialize new app with CRA and add a new component named Posts and Post

npx create-react-app dev-news

cd dev-news # change dir to dev-news

mkdir src/components # create components dir in src

touch src/components/Posts.js \
 src/components/Post.js # create Posts.js & Post.js Files

code . # open VSCode

And following are the components to show the list of the posts; I’m putting some barebones of the Component code

import React, { useEffect, useState } from 'react'
const devTo = 'https://dev.to/api/articles'

const Post = ({post}) => (
  <a href={post.url} key={post.id} className="post">
    <article>
      <img src={post.social_image} alt={post.title} />
      <div>
        <h1>{post.title}</h1>
        <p>{post.description}</p>
      </div>
    </article>
  </a>
)

const Posts = () => {
  const [posts, setPosts] = useState([])
  useEffect(() => {
    fetch(devTo).then(r=> r.json()).then(setPosts)
  }, [])

  return posts.map(post => <Post post={post} />)
}

export default Posts

And it will look like the following

Now, we will deploy above on the GitHub pages. But, first, let’s make a new repository and push our new project to the repository.

And now will commit all the changes to the above repo with following git commands.

git init # initialize the repo
git add . # stage all changes
git commit -m "🚀 init" # commit the staged changes
# add GitHub origin remote of the new repo
git remote add origin [e-mail]:time2hack/dev.to.git
git push -u origin master # push master to the origin

Now let’s make a directory with the name .github and workflows inside .github.

Inside the workflows directory, we can create workflows which will run the GitHub actions.

As we want to publish to GitHub pages, we will name our workflow file publish.yaml

Now in this file, we need to write some actions/commands that need to run in specific order to publish on the GitHub pages

Following will be the contents of our publish.yaml file:

name: github-pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Setup Node
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: "12.x"

      - name: Get yarn cache
        id: yarn-cache
        run: echo "::set-output name=dir::$(yarn cache dir)"

      - name: Cache dependencies
        uses: actions/cache@v1
        with:
          path: ${{ steps.yarn-cache.outputs.dir }}
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-yarn-${{ hashFiles('**/yarn.lock') }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-yarn-

      - name: Installing Dependencies
        run: yarn install

      - name: Building App
        run: yarn build

      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./build

Now we will commit the above file and push it to the master.

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Now let’s take a look at what this YAML file has as Jargon:

1. name specifies the name for the script or action. name used anywhere in the above file is to display helpful labels on the GH Actions UI instead of commands
2. on is the event listener specification, here we want to react only on the push to master branch
3. jobs specify the tasks related to this workflow file. There can be more than one and will be running one by one
4. deploy is the job name
5. steps describes the steps that need to run for the job
6. uses: actions/checkout@v2 specifies to execute another action. In this case, it is the v2 of GitHub - actions/checkout: Action for checking out a repo
7. with sets up named parameters for actions or commands
8. run executes the command on the shell
9. id gives a unique identifier to the step, so that we can access the output of this step in other steps

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/As the YAML keywords are out of the way, let's see what this workflow’s YAML is doing:/

1. Uses ubuntu-18.04 as OS/execution environment
2. Uses actions/checkout@v2 checks out the repo for the workflow
3. Setup node 12.x with action actions/setup-node@v1
4. Setting environment variable for the Yarn cache
5. Caching the Yarn cache directory with cache key ${{ runner.os }}-yarn-${{ hashFiles('**/yarn.lock') }} . Here hashFiles('**/yarn.lock') is generating a hash of yarn.lock file. If this file has not changed, cache with similar hash exists, it will be restored by the restore-keys
6. Install dependencies with yarn install
7. Build the project with yarn build
8. Using action peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3, deploy the ./build directory to Github Pages

An important thing to note here is that Create React App’s build depends on the homepage key in package.json

So make your build work with the GitHub pages, you need to set the homepage in package.json.

For this example, the repository is https://github.com/time2hack/dev.to/; the Github Pages’ URL or homepage will be https://time2hack.github.io/dev.to/. This URL is in the homepage key in package.json

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And yes, Don’t forget to enable GitHub pages for your repository

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Conclusion

We saw how the Github Actions are super easy to deploy the website on Github Pages.

We also saw what are basic parts of Github Actions’ Workflow File & used these parts to write deploy job.

Let me know through comments 💬 or on Twitter at @patel_pankaj_ and @time2hack

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Credits

• WHCompare Servers & Web Hosting icons by Alexiuz AS
• Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash

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Originally published at https://time2hack.com on Aug 10, 2020.