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_site
folder 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.
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.html
to index.adoc
and modified this file accordingly in order to leverage AsciiDoc.
Use the helaili/jekyll-action@master
action in your workflow file. It needs access to the out-of-the-box GITHUB_TOKEN
secret. 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_src
parameter (sample_site
for us). The SRC
environment 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_src
input parameter accordingly.
Use the actions/cache
action in the workflow as well, to shorten build times and decrease load on GitHub's servers
name: Testing the GitHub Pages publication
on:
push
jobs:
jekyll:
runs-on: ubuntu-16.04
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
# Use GitHub Actions' cache to shorten build times and decrease load on servers
- uses: actions/cache@v2
with:
path: vendor/bundle
key: ${{ runner.os }}-gems-${{ hashFiles('**/Gemfile') }}
restore-keys: |
${{ runner.os }}-gems-
# Standard usage
- uses: helaili/jekyll-action@v2
with:
token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
# Specify the Jekyll source location as a parameter
- uses: helaili/jekyll-action@v2
with:
token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
jekyll_src: 'sample_site'
# Specify the target branch (optional)
- uses: helaili/jekyll-action@v2
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-pages
environment to navigate to your GitHub Pages site.
The GITHUB_TOKEN
secret. This is mandatory unless build_only
is 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 imagemagick
to 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_files
option in your _config.yml
file to select the files you want to keep. Make sure you then keep at least the .git
folder. This option will also remove the --force
flag from the git commit...
command.
keep_files: [.git, hello.html]
This action previously used a JEKYLL_PAT
environment variable instead of the token
parameter. This is now depreacted.
Create a ACTIONS_STEP_DEBUG
secret with value true
and run the workflow again.
If you're using a Custom Domain for your GitHub Pages site, you will need to ensure that the CNAME
file 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 CNAME
file.
If your GitHub Pages site is run off an alternate branch, however, you will need to manually create and commit the CNAME
file 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.