How to Automatically Publish a Blog Using GitHub Actions

In this post, I used Travis to enable automatic blog publishing. However, I recently discovered that Travis does not run automatically anymore (though it works manually). I haven’t looked into it closely because GitHub Actions have been introduced, so I decided to move all dependencies to GitHub.

Go Action

Click on Actions on the repository page, and then New Workflow to see recommended actions. Since this blog uses Go code, it shows the Go Action.

The rest involves following Travis’s approach to set up the workflow.

1. Check out the blog’s repo
2. Check out the publishing site repo
3. make
4. Commit the changes to the publishing site

Note that write permissions are required for the publishing site, so you need to configure a token, similar to Travis.

1. Generate a token with only repo permissions
2. Go to a particular repo and set up secrets (enter the token). Ideally, this should be set up on the publishing site, but it works when set in the blog repo. I haven’t explored why yet.

You will need two actions in total: one is GitHub’s own checkout, and the other is a third-party action called “Push directory to another repository”. There might be better options available, and I’ll explore them when I have more time.

Finally, here is my simple GitHub Action CI file:

name: CI

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:
  build:
    name: Build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:

    - name: Set up Go 1.x
      uses: actions/setup-go@v2
      with:
        go-version: ^1.13

    - name: Check out code into the Go module directory
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Get dependencies
      run: |
        go get -v -t -d ./...
        if [ -f Gopkg.toml ]; then
            curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/golang/dep/master/install.sh | sh
            dep ensure
        fi        

    - name: Check out my other private repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        repository: jackysp/jackysp.github.io
        token: ${{ secrets.UPDATE_BLOG }}
        path: public

    - name: Build
      run: make
    
    - name: Pushes to another repository
      id: public
      uses: cpina/github-action-push-to-another-repository@cp_instead_of_deleting
      env:
        API_TOKEN_GITHUB: ${{ secrets.UPDATE_BLOG }}
      with:
        source-directory: 'public'
        destination-github-username: 'jackysp'
        destination-repository-name: 'jackysp.github.io'
        user-email: [email protected]
        commit-message: See ORIGIN_COMMIT