GitHub Actions

Got accepted in the beta program for GitHub Actions. So, naturally, let’s create an action to publish this blog!

Prior to using Actions, I used a Makefile to publish the blog. It was simple, short and easy. So, why bother with using Actions? For fun and profit of course! Also, publishing is now just one step: git push origin/master. Winning!

Often I find that being lazy has led to major productivity boots in my life because I absolutely hate to repeat tasks. I learned early on in my career to automate early and often to help avoid burnout. Why do something manually (ugh!) when I could automate it (yes!)?

For scripting the building and publishing of my blog, I used benmatselby/hugo-deploy-gh-pages as a starting point. If you follow the link, you will notice that the repository is a GitHub Action that you can use directly. I didn’t use the action because I wanted to modify the way it publishes the site and I didn’t want to pass it my GitHub token.

To use GitHub Actions, just add a workflow file to the repository. For me, it was .github/workflows/hugo.yml with the following contents:

name: Publish Blog with Hugo
on:
  push:
    branches:
    - master
jobs:

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

    - name: Checkout master
      uses: actions/checkout@v1
      with:
        submodules: true

    - name: Build and publish blog
      env:
        HUGO_VERSION: 0.58.2
        TOKEN: ${{ secrets.TOKEN }}
      run: |
        scripts/action.sh

The above basically translates to: on push to master, spin up an Ubuntu box, checkout this repository with submodules and lastly run my script defined in this repository with specific environment variables. Remember, this is beta so things will likely change. Syntax documentation can be found here.

The only thing left to do before pushing to master is to setup the secret. In your GitHub account, go to Profile Settings | Developer Settings | Personal access tokens | Generate new token. Give the token public_repo access. Copy the token after it is created. Go to the repository with the action, Settings | Secrets. Add a new secret, name it TOKEN and paste in the generated token from earlier. Now trigger the action with a good old git push origin/master.

That’s it! Visit the repository’s Actions tab to watch the workflow execute. So far, I’m liking the syntax. The steps with the uses: are a particularly interesting extension model. This actually grabs the action from a repository. For example, actions/checkout@v1 can be found here and it has various settings you can pass to the action.

This is all new to me, but not entirely sure how comfortable I would be using non-standard actions due to security and stability concerns. More research is required, but I certainly love the idea of using this model for my own actions. I’d like to see what it is like to wrap my current deployment script into an action repository.

Conclusion

Very easy to get started with GitHub actions. I actually got it working while waiting for a flight at the airport. Looking forward to writing my own actions and exploring the rest of the features available to GitHub Actions.