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

As we known, GitHub Pages runs in safe mode and only allows a set of whitelisted 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@v2

      # Use GitHub Actions' cache to cache dependencies on servers
      - uses: actions/cache@v1
        with:
          path: vendor/bundle
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-gems-${{ hashFiles('**/Gemfile.lock') }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-gems-

      # Use GitHub Deploy Action to build and deploy to Github
      - uses: jeffreytse/[email protected]
        with:
          provider: 'github'
          token: ${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }} # It's your Personal Access Token(PAT)
          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 using _config.yml
          bundler_ver: '>=0'         # Default is latest bundler version
          cname: ''                  # Default is to not use a cname
          actor: ''                  # Default is the GITHUB_ACTOR

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 * * * *'

After this, we should provide permissions for this action to push to the gh-pages branch:

• Create a Personal Token with repos 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.

• 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.