github-actions VS deploy-appengine

Aha: it's because the project team merged this change that intentionally fails the build when people have pinned their workflows to use the deprecated branch name: https://github.com/google-github-actions/setup-gcloud/pull/5...

(that makes sense; there has been a warning in place for a long time, and pinning to a name can be risky when the content within that reference may change over time)

In the process of finding the answer, I discovered that the small actions are pretty much open-source. I can also go directly to their respective code repositories and learn about them. To run gsutil, I will need a setup-gcloud action.

Like many aspects of the cloud, there are many ways to achieve the same result, but modern software engineering encourages CI/CD processes for several good reasons. As such, we will focus on deploying our service from Github Actions using setup-gcloud

GKE_SA_KEY: The service account used for the project with the Base64 encoded JSON service account key. More info available here

View on GitHub

If you're using GitHub, you could even set up a GitHub Action to automatically deploy changes to your site as soon as you push your commits up (https://github.com/google-github-actions/deploy-appengine).

There are 2 core parts authentication to GCP and App Engine deployment. Authentication is performed using auth, while a deployment uses deploy-appengine.

Yes, there is a deploy-appengine action that automates the whole App Engine deployment process. Indeed, it uses gcloud commands underneath too. Either way, both approaches need an auth action to authenticate to GCP before any task can be performed.