How I replaced Travis CI with GitHub Actions to build my website

19 May 2022

It’s been a while since I posted last. In fact I was meaning to post something else first, but I came to the realization that I no longer can use my old Travis CI setup without making some changes. However, instead of fixing it, I took the opportunity to learn something new and decided to give GitHub Actions a go!

To learn about the setup of the website and repository, please read my old article “How I use Travis CI to build my website”.

Without changing the structure of the repository, I only had to create a definition for my new GitHub workflow and commit it on my main branch (release in this case). GitHub then validated the workflow and made it appear in my Actions.

I called the workflow “Deploy site” and I stored it in .github/workflows/deploy-site.yml.

You can choose to re-use existing actions, do everything manually or do like me - mix of both.

The actions I re-used are:

  • actions/checkout for checking-out my repository
  • ruby/setup-ruby for downloading and setting up ruby
  • peaceiris/actions-gh-pages to deploy my static files to the master branch

Once my static files end up in master, GitHub’s pages-build-deployment workflow would be automatically triggered and will deploy the website to GitHub Pages.

Here is the definition I used

# .github/workflows/deploy-site.yml
name: Deploy site

on:
  push:
    branches: release

env:
  RUBY_VERSION: 2.7

jobs:
  build-deploy:
    name: "Build and deploy"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      
      - name: Set up Ruby
        uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
        with:
          ruby-version: $
          bundler-cache: true

      - name: Set up dependencies
        run: |
          gem update --system --no-document
          gem update bundler --no-document
          bundle config set path vendor/bundle
          bundle install --jobs 4 --retry 3
          bundle clean

      - name: Build
        run: JEKYLL_ENV=production bundle exec jekyll build --verbose --trace

      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          github_token: $
          publish_dir: ./_site
          publish_branch: master
          commit_message: $
          user_name: 'github-actions[bot]'
          user_email: 'github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com'
          force_orphan: false
          destination_dir: ./
          cname: mitevstefan.com

References

  • https://github.com/actions/checkout
  • https://github.com/ruby/setup-ruby
  • https://github.com/peaceiris/actions-gh-pages
  • https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll
 CI  jekyll