Although you can connect your GitHub branch directly to Netlify and deploy your website using a build command, sometimes you may want to use Github Actions for building your website and then deploy on Netlify. One of the strongest reason to do is that you get 2000 free build minutes in Github Actions as compared to 300 free build minutes in Netlify. If you are updating your website frequently, you may soon run out of these build minutes (Of course, you can buy the Pro pack on Netlify).
In this article, you will:
- Build your website on Github Actions
- Push the build directory to the
website-buildbranch - Configure Netlify to use the
website-buildbranch to deploy your website
Contents
- Creating a Demo Website
- Creating a Build Branch
- Building Website using Github Actions
- Configuring Netlify
- Results
Creating a Demo Website
You’ll be using Jekyll to create a website for this demo. You can use any framework to build your website because, in the end, you will just create a build directory that you will push to another branch on your Github repository.
# create a boilerplate jekyll website
jekyll new my-awesome-site
# change the directory
cd my-awesome-site
# git add all the unstaged files
git add .
# give a good commit message
git commit -m "feat: first website commit"
# push to the origin
git push origin master
Alright. Now you have your website code in your Github Repo.
Creating a Build Branch
Since you are going to push your website build to the website-build branch, first you need to create a new branch. In your terminal, run the following commands:
# create a new branch
git checkout --orphan website-build
# remove all files from the staging area
git rm -rf .
# create an empty commit to initialize branch
git commit --allow-empty -m "root commit"
# push branch to origin
git push origin website-build
Building Website using Github Actions
Now that your branch and website are set up, the next step is to write a Github Action. In your terminal, run the following commands:
# switch back to master branch
git checkout master
# create a directory for github actions
mkdir -p .github/workflows
# create a workflow file for github actions
touch .github/workflows/netlify.yml
Add the following script in netlify.yml:
name: Build
on:
push:
branches:
- master
jobs:
build:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout repository
uses: actions/checkout@v2
with:
ref: master
- name: Set up Ruby
uses: actions/setup-ruby@v1
with:
ruby-version: 2.7
- name: Install Dependencies
run: |
gem install bundler
bundle install
- name: Create Build
run: bundle exec jekyll build -d public
- name: Upload artifacts
uses: actions/upload-artifact@v1
with:
name: public
path: public
commit-build:
needs: build
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Clone the repoitory
uses: actions/checkout@v2
with:
ref: website-build
- name: Configure Git
run: |
git config --global user.email ${GITHUB_ACTOR}@gmail.com
git config --global user.name ${GITHUB_ACTOR}
- name: Download website build
uses: actions/download-artifact@v1
with:
name: public
path: public
- name: Commit and Push
run: |
if [ $(git status --porcelain=v1 2>/dev/null | wc -l) != "0" ] ; then
git add -f public
git commit -m "gh-actions deployed a new website build"
git push --force https://${GITHUB_ACTOR}:$@github.com/${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}.git HEAD:website-build
fi
The above action does two jobs.
In the build job, you check out your current repository, set up Ruby since you are using Jekyll, install dependencies, build the website, and add upload the public directory as an artifact.
In the commit-build job, you wait for the build job to finish, then check out the website-build branch, configure Git settings, download your build artifact, and finally push the public directory if any changes are found.
Next, execute the following commands in your terminal to push this Github Action to the upstream repository.
# add the new files
git add .
# create a new commit with a descriptive message
git commit -m "feat: added netlify build workflow"
# push github actions workflow file to the origin
git push origin master
Once the git operation is complete, visit the Actions tab on Github.
Configuring Netlify
The final thing you need to do is to configure Netlify. You need to change two things to make sure everything runs smoothly.
First, change your Branch to Deploy to website-build. Second, update your Publish Directory to artifacts. Now, whenever a push will be made to the website-build branch, Netlify will automatically deploy your website from the website-build branch.
Results
So that was easy. Using this workflow, you can also deploy your websites on Github Pages. There are a lot of developers complaining about issues with Jekyll plugins that are not supported by Github Pages. You can use Github Actions and commit your build to another branch and configure Github Pages to use that branch for deploying your website.
