Automated Deployments

Until now, I used to write a blog post and just run a shell script called deploy.sh that runs a hugo build command and rsyncs the whole folder to my dockerized web server. I wrote a post about that a year ago.

I was fine with that, until something in my environment broke and I had to tinker around until it worked again. So I’ve decided to re-build the deployment process using github actions. Now by blog gets deployed automatically everytime I run ‘git push’, which is amazing for someone like me, who is lazy and has no time to waste.

It turned out that I had to spend more time failing to automate the whole thing than I’d rather spend on just running deploy.sh, but I’ve learned some things.

As posting the whole script would be a slight overkill (and google is full of examples), here’s only my key learnings:

• Checking out another Git repo than the one of the blog is a pain, as you need to generate at least an access token if it is a private one (my theme is that kind of repo)
• The repo running the action is always checked out into branch name (main in my case) as a folder name
• Using github secrets for storing server auth data is quite cool but I have no clue how they securely store that stuff
• There’s an action plugin (are they even called plugins?) for almost anything you need, but it never fits 100% of your needs
• Debugging a Github action is a pain

But hey, when you read this post, it got automatically deployed!

// edit: also, I am now able to write blog posts from any device with a web browser, using Github code spaces. [sent from my iphone]