🪂 A GitHub Action to deploy the Jekyll site conveniently for GitHub Pages.

JEKYLL DEPLOY ACTION

As we known, GitHub Pages runs in safe mode and a set of allow-listed plugins. To use the gem in GitHub Pages, you need to build locally or use CI (e.g. travis, github workflow) and deploy to your gh-pages branch.

Therefore, if you want to make Jekyll site run as if it were local, such as let the custom plugins work properly, this action can be very useful for you, beacause it's really convenient to build and deploy the Jekyll site to Github Pages.

At First, you should add a github workflow file (e.g. .github/workflows/build-jekyll.yml) in your repository's master branch as below:

name: Build and Deploy to Github Pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master  # Here source code branch is `master`, it could be other branch

jobs:
  build_and_deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      # Use GitHub Actions' cache to cache dependencies on servers
      - uses: actions/cache@v4
        with:
          path: |
            .asdf/**
            vendor/bundle
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-cache-${{ hashFiles('**/cache.key') }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-cache-

      # Use GitHub Deploy Action to build and deploy to Github
      # For latest version: `jeffreytse/jekyll-deploy-action@master`
      - uses: jeffreytse/[email protected]
        with:
          provider: 'github'         # Default is github
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} # It's your Personal Access Token(PAT)
          ssh_private_key: ''        # It's your SSH private key (SSH approach)
          repository: ''             # Default is current repository
          branch: 'gh-pages'         # Default is gh-pages for github provider
          jekyll_src: './'           # Default is root directory
          jekyll_cfg: '_config.yml'  # Default is _config.yml
          jekyll_baseurl: ''         # Default is according to _config.yml
          ruby_ver: ''               # Default is 3.2.0 version
          bundler_ver: ''            # Default is compatible bundler version (~>2.5.0)
          cname: ''                  # Default is to not use a cname
          actor: ''                  # Default is the GITHUB_ACTOR
          pre_build_commands: ''     # Installing additional dependencies (Arch Linux)

Now this action supports the following providers:

• github: To publish the site to GitHub.
• test: To check if build passes on pull requests without publishing the site.
• ssh: To publish the site into any server which supports SSH protocol.
• ...

To schedule a workflow, you can use the POSIX cron syntax in your workflow file. The shortest interval you can run scheduled workflows is once every 5 minutes. For example, this workflow is triggered every hour.

on:
  schedule:
    - cron:  '0 * * * *'

At the start of each workflow run, GitHub automatically creates a unique GITHUB_TOKEN secret to use in your workflow. You can use the GITHUB_TOKEN to authenticate in a workflow run. You can use the GITHUB_TOKEN by using the standard syntax for referencing secrets: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}. For more information, you can see here.

If you need a token that requires permissions that aren't available in the GITHUB_TOKEN, you can create a Personal Access Token (PAT), and set it as a secret in your repository for this action to push to the gh-pages branch:

• Create a Personal Access Token with custom permissions and copy the value.
• Go to your repository’s Settings and then switch to the Secrets tab.
• Create a token named GH_TOKEN (important) using the value copied.

In the end, go to your repository’s Settings and scroll down to the GitHub Pages section, choose the gh-pages branch as your GitHub Pages source.

Additionally, if you don't have the gh-pages branch, you can create it as below:

git checkout --orphan gh-pages
git rm -rf .
git commit --allow-empty -m "initial commit"
git push origin gh-pages

💡 Tip: The gh-pages branch is only for the site static files and the master branch is for source code.

If you use jekyll-last-modified-at plugin, you can configure the checkout action to fetch all commit history so that plugin could use the last Git commit date to determine a page's last modified date.

- uses: actions/checkout@v3
  with:
    # The checkout action doesn't provide a way to get all commit history for a single branch
    # So we use the magic number 2147483647 here which means infinite depth for git fetch
    # See https://github.com/actions/checkout/issues/520, https://stackoverflow.com/a/6802238
    fetch-depth: 2147483647

If your site building needs some specific environments, here are some recipes for you:

# NodeJS
pre_build_commands: pacman -S --noconfirm nodejs npm

# Python
pre_build_commands: pacman -S --noconfirm python

# Gem RMagick
pre_build_commands: pacman -S --noconfirm imagemagick

# Jekyll-Picture-Tag
pre_build_commands: pacman -S --noconfirm libvips lcms2 openjpeg2 libpng libwebp libheif imagemagick openslide libjxl poppler-glib

If you prefer to deploy your site in SSH approach for better stability, you can also creates a unique SSH_PRIVATE_KEY secret to use in your workflow:

ssh_private_key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}

Note: SSH approach has higher priority than HTTP approach when you provide both at the same time.

• Jekyll - A blog-aware static site generator in Ruby.
• actions/checkout - Action for checking out a repo.
• actions/cache - Cache dependencies and build outputs in GitHub Actions.

Issues and Pull Requests are greatly appreciated. If you've never contributed to an open source project before I'm more than happy to walk you through how to create a pull request.

You can start by opening an issue describing the problem that you're looking to resolve and we'll go from there.

This software is licensed under the MIT license © JeffreyTse.