A Simple Guide to Github Page Deployment

Long story short: Jekyll is a template engine changing

markdown

HTML

Usual Process

Normally the process of adding new post looks like this:

• I write markdown document with setting parameters like title, date and tags
• when I’m happy with what I wrote (never), I commit changes and push it to repository on GitHub. Repository name comes from my nick and is also address for blog

  asvid.github.io

• Github after pushing to branch master builds website from sources using Jekyll - probably something like running

  jekyll build

• result of Jekyll build is not present in a repository, but you see it right now after visiting bloga page

The above process works entirely automatically, no need of configuration on repo site or GitHub itself. All you need is having repo name that follows this pattern:

{user_name}.github.io

I want plugins

Sometimes you want to add something cool to your page. I wanted to have it in multiple languages, like Polish and English. Jekyll is not supporting this natively… but it is not impossible 😄

So I’ve found a plugin Polyglot, that allows adding many languages on same page without need of complete rebuild or restructure. I used it, after a while it was kinda working. After a while longer it was working as I wanted. Locally.

After pushing changes to GitHub page wasn’t working properly. I learned that GitHub is not simply building everything you throw at it, but it has a whitelist of supported plugins. Polyglot is sadly not on this list, despite its creator's attempts to get it on the list. Whitelist itself is understandable for security reasons, we don’t want to GitHub go down because of some evil plugin or hidden bitcoin miner running on GitHub servers.

But I really need this plugin

Like every problem this one also has a solution. Even few of them. You can build the page locally and push it to the

master

develop

But I’m lazy and I don’t want to build manually and push sources and build
result separately, also I don’t have NodeJS app, so I use solution number 3.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a basic CI available for free for every repository. To use this CI you need to create Workflow with yaml configuration telling it what and when should happen. There are many available actions, and if something is missing, you can do one yourself or combine few into one workflow. To add workflow go to your

repository->actions->New workflow

and then click link to set up a workflow yourself.

This will add yaml file with config inside repository in directory

.github/workflows

To publish Jekyll blog with not whitelisted plugins I used Jekyll-Actions configured inside workflow like this:

name: 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@v1
      with:
        path: vendor/bundle
        key: $-gems-$
        restore-keys: |
          $-gems-
    # Standard usage
    - uses:  helaili/[email protected]
      env:
        JEKYLL_PAT: $
    
    # Specify the Jekyll source location as a parameter
    - uses: helaili/[email protected]
      env:
        JEKYLL_PAT: $

This action runs inside

ubuntu-16.04

• downloads repository after each push (on every branch which is causing some issue)
• is using cache to not download same

  Gems

  each run
• runs action to build page and publish ot on branch

  master

  , with a push that is possible thanks to

  secrets.JEKYLL_PAT

And this publishing on branch master means that you shouldn't push source changes to this branch. If you want to use this action, you need to push changes to develop and leave master only for files build and pushed by the script.

How to create

secret.JEKYLL_PAT

Action itself works in isolated container and has no write access to your
repository. It can read it because its public. To allow this, you need to create access token with public_repo scope, and then add it in repository as a secret with name expected by configuration

secret.JEKYLL_PAT

You generate token from GitHub account settings:

Settings->Developer Settings->Personal Access Tokens

After clicking button on the bottom Generate token you will have the only chance to copy it, I suggest taking it 😃

Copied token needs to be pasted to repository secrets:

Settings->Secrets->New secret

secrets.JEKYLL_PAT

And it should work. At least works for me 😏

This article was also posted on Jekyll blog hosted on GitHub, with the use of free Github Pages.

Previously published at https://asvid.github.io/github-page-deployment