A GitHub Action to publish Jekyll based content as a GitHub Pages site
A GitHub Action to build and publish Jekyll sites to GitHub Pages
Out-of-the-box Jekyll with GitHub Pages allows you to leverage a limited, white-listed, set of gems. Complex sites requiring custom ones or non white-listed ones (AsciiDoc for intstance) used to require a continuous integration build in order to pre-process the site.
Remember that GitHub is serving your built static site, not it's sources. So when configuring GitHub Pages in your project settings, use gh-pages branch as a Source for GitHub Pages. If you are setting up username.github.io repository, you'll have to use master branch, so sources can be located in another orphaned branch in the repo (which you can safely mark as default after the first publication). In addition to that default behaviour, you can configure the branch this plugin pushes into with the
target_branch-option. Keep in mind to set the source branch accordingly at the GitHub Pages Settings page.
Note that this is a rather simple (naive maybe) Docker based action. @limjh16 has created a JS based version of this action which saves the container download time and might help with non default use cases (such as but not limited to: specific package or library that is not available as a Gem).
If you repo doesn't already have one, create a new Jekyll site:
jekyll new sample-site. See the Jekyll website for more information. In this repo, we have created a site within a
sample_sitefolder within the repository because the repository's main goal is not to be a website. If it was the case, we would have created the site at the root of the repository.
Gemfile
As you are using this action to leverage specific Gems, well, you need to declare them! In the sample below we are using the Jekyll AsciiDoc plugin
source 'https://rubygems.org'gem 'jekyll', '
> 3.8.5' gem 'coderay', '> 1.1.0'group :jekyll_plugins do gem 'jekyll-asciidoc', '~> 2.1.1' end
Edit the configuration file of your Jekyll site (
_config.yml) to leverage these plugins. In our sample, we want to leverage AsciiDoc so we added the following section:
asciidoc: {} asciidoctor: base_dir: :docdir safe: unsafe attributes: - idseparator=_ - source-highlighter=coderay - icons=font
Note that we also renamed
index.htmlto
index.adocand modified this file accordingly in order to leverage AsciiDoc.
Use the
helaili/[email protected]action in your workflow file. It needs access to the out-of-the-box
GITHUB_TOKENsecret. The directory where the Jekyll site lives will be detected (based on the location of
_config.yml) but you can also explicitly set this directory by setting the
jekyll_srcparameter (
sample_sitefor us). The
SRCenvironment variable is also supported for backward compatibilty but it is deprecated. The action will search for Gemfile location. If your want to specify it explicitly (e.g. if you have multiple Gemfiles per project), you should update
gem_srcinput parameter accordingly.
Use the
actions/cacheaction in the workflow as well, to shorten build times and decrease load on GitHub's servers
name: Testing the GitHub Pages publicationon: push
jobs: jekyll: runs-on: ubuntu-16.04 steps: - uses: actions/[email protected]
# Use GitHub Actions' cache to shorten build times and decrease load on servers - uses: actions/[email protected] with: path: vendor/bundle key: ${{ runner.os }}-gems-${{ hashFiles('**/Gemfile') }} restore-keys: | ${{ runner.os }}-gems- # Standard usage - uses: helaili/[email protected] with: token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} # Specify the Jekyll source location as a parameter - uses: helaili/[email protected] with: token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} jekyll_src: 'sample_site' # Specify the target branch (optional) - uses: helaili/[email protected] with: token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} target_branch: 'gh-pages'
Upon successful execution, the GitHub Pages publishing will happen automatically and will be listed on the environment tab of your repository.
Just click on the View deployment button of the
github-pagesenvironment to navigate to your GitHub Pages site.
The
GITHUB_TOKENsecret. This is mandatory unless
build_onlyis set to
true.
The Jekyll environment to build (default to
production)
The Jekyll website source directory
Additional Jekyll build arguments (see the Jekyll doc)
The Jekyll Gemfile directory
The target branch name the sources get pushed to
When set to
true, the Jekyll site will be built but not published
Commands to run prior to build and deploy. Useful for ensuring build dependencies are up to date or installing new dependencies. For example, use
apk --update add imagemagickto install ImageMagick.
When set to
true, previous version of the site will be restored before the Jekyll build takes place. You can then use the
keep_filesoption in your
_config.ymlfile to select the files you want to keep. Make sure you then keep at least the
.gitfolder. This option will also remove the
--forceflag from the
git commit...command.
keep_files: [.git, hello.html]
This action previously used a
JEKYLL_PATenvironment variable instead of the
tokenparameter. This is now depreacted.
Create a
ACTIONS_STEP_DEBUGsecret with value
trueand run the workflow again.
If you're using a Custom Domain for your GitHub Pages site, you will need to ensure that the
CNAMEfile exists in the repository root of the
main(or
master) branch so that it can be copied to the deployment root when your site is deployed.
If your GitHub Pages site is run off the
main(or
master) branch, you can modify the Custom Domain setting in the Repository Settings to automatically generate and commit the
CNAMEfile.
If your GitHub Pages site is run off an alternate branch, however, you will need to manually create and commit the
CNAMEfile with your custom domain as its contents, otherwise the file will be committed to the deployment branch and overwritten the next time the action is run.