GitHub Pages Deploy Action 🚀

This GitHub action will handle the building and deploying process of your project to GitHub Pages. It can be configured to upload your production ready code into any branch you'd like, including gh-pages and docs.

Getting Started ✈️

Before you get started you must first create a fresh branch where the action will deploy the files to. You can replace gh-pages with whatever branch you'd like to use in the example below.

git checkout --orphan gh-pages
git rm -rf .
touch README.md
git add README.md
git commit -m 'Initial gh-pages commit'
git push origin gh-pages

Once setup you can then include the action in your workflow to trigger on any event that GitHub actions supports.

action "Deploy to GitHub Pages" {
  uses = "JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@master"
  env = {
    BUILD_SCRIPT = "npm install && npm run-script build"
    BRANCH = "gh-pages"
    FOLDER = "build"
  }
  secrets = ["ACCESS_TOKEN"]
}

If you'd like to filter the action so it only triggers on a specific branch you can combine it with the filter action. You can find an example of this below.

workflow "Deploy to Github Pages" {
  on = "push"
  resolves = ["Deploy to gh-pages"]
}

action "master branch only" {
  uses = "actions/bin/filter@master"
  args = "branch master"
}

action "Deploy to gh-pages" {
  uses = "JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@master"
  env = {
    BRANCH = "gh-pages"
    BUILD_SCRIPT = "npm install && npm run-script build"
    FOLDER = "build"
  }
  secrets = ["ACCESS_TOKEN"]
  needs = ["master branch only"]
}

Configuration 📁

The secrets and env portion of the workflow must be configured before the action will work. Below you'll find a description of what each one does.

Key	Value Information	Type	Required
ACCESS_TOKEN	In order for GitHub to trigger the rebuild of your page you must provide the action with a GitHub personal access token. You can learn more about how to generate one here. This should be stored as a secret.	secrets	Yes
BRANCH	This is the branch you wish to deploy to, for example gh-pages or docs.	env	Yes
FOLDER	The folder in your repository that you want to deploy. If your build script compiles into a directory named build you'd put it here.	env	Yes
BASE_BRANCH	The base branch of your repository which you'd like to checkout prior to deploying. This defaults to master.	env	No
BUILD_SCRIPT	If you require a build script to compile your code prior to pushing it you can add the script here. The Docker container which powers the action runs Node which means npm commands are valid. If you're using a static site generator such as Jekyll I'd suggest compiling the code prior to pushing it to your base branch.	env	No
COMMIT_NAME	Used to sign the commit, this should be your name. If not provided it will default to username@users.noreply.github.com	env	No
COMMIT_EMAIL	Used to sign the commit, this should be your email. If not provided it will default to your username.	env	No

With the action correctly configured you should see something similar to this in your GitHub actions workflow editor.