git-actions VS ssh-action

git-actions - Run any Git command in Github Actions

This GitHub action will use another ssh-action action to handle the remote ssh connection. After storing the connection credentials in the GitHub repository secrets, this can securely/dynamically connect to the remote Ubuntu machine. The last key for this action job is the script, or verbatim Ubuntu commands that will be run. For the sake of brevity, I have only written pseudo-code for the deployment steps.

If you have SSH setup, you could have the your pipeline SSH in and run start your script. A quick search found a few actions that might work, including this one that does most of the heavy lifting for you. Just setup your secrets, give it the command you want to run, and it'll go from there. Good luck!

Then on my backend and frontend GitHub repos, I'll have another GitHub Actions workflow that uses something like appleboy/ssh-action to simply SSH into my server, pull the new images, and re-start the containers, whenever someone pushes to master.

Personally I use GitHub Actions that connects via SSH and runs custom bash deploy scripts.

Executing remote ssh commands using appleboy/ssh-action@master.

Yeah it's definitely a pet project. I'll look into Puppet for actual applications. Do you think that something like this would be a good, realistic alternative rather than going over HTTPS, if the use case is just a few simple, repeated shell commands: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/ssh-remote-commands

SSH Remote Commands

Or you combine part of both and use a GitHub action to run the script from the first action as a remote SSH command: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/ssh-remote-commands

You could add a Github Action to your repo which uses https://github.com/appleboy/ssh-action that SSHs into your server, pulls the repo there and restarts pm2.