github-pages-deploy-action VS checkout

The interesting part is towards the bottom where we build the frontend code and make use of the github-pages-deploy-action step to automatically make a new commit with the compiled frontend code to a gh-pages branch.

Finally, will do the deploy on github pages using the scripts from JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action, and create a branch gh-pages with the code from apps/web/build.

- Deploy to GitHub Pages using GitHub Actions

For Storybook deploy, we will use github-pages-deploy-action

If you've built a site that can be rendered statically, then you can probably set up a GitHub Pages deploy via GitHub Actions (since Pages supports only Jekyll by default, you need this for any other static site generator). But if you have a server component, then you'll need to host it some other way.

Around three years ago I created the github-pages-deploy-action project as my first real venture into the world of open source. I built this action so I could make continued updates to a blog while being away from my work laptop. The community response has been fantastic and I'm very happy with how it has evolved over the years as a result. I even had the opportunity to be interviewed by GitHub for my involvement back in 2020 which you can read here.

This action is a composite action using shell scripts for installing necessary tools and preparing docs and makes use of JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action for deploying the docs to a GitHub Pages branch.

github-pages-deploy-action is used to push a static exported site to gh-pages branch.

Lastly, we use another Action to deploy our project to GitHub Pages – but only if the workflow is running on the master or main branch (we don't want development branches to be deployed to the public!). We point this action to the build/distributions folder, which is where building a Kotlin/JS project creates the final .js and .html artifacts.

checkout

To checkout the merged commit with actions/checkout on pull_request_target event, you need to get the pull request by GitHub API and set the merge commit hash to actions/checkout input ref.

If you re-run GHA after master changes, CI is testing over different code.

You can [disable](https://github.com/actions/checkout#checkout-pull-request-head-commit-instead-of-merge-commit) on the checkout action:

```

There was an outage yesterday too when the GitHub action “checkout@v3” broke when they released “checkout@v4”

Yes, they broke the ability for GitHub CI to checkout repos…

https://github.com/actions/checkout/issues/1448

The first two steps are setting up the job's environment. The checkout action will checkout out the repository at the triggering ref. The setup-python action will setup the desired Python runtime. My package supports Python 3.9+ so I'm targeting the minimum version for my build environments.

These first few steps demonstrate how you can run commands like npm install or import other workflows such as how it uses the actions/checkout to copy the contents of the repository into a working directory on the runner host. Read Reusable workflows for more about the syntax for referencing them.

Check out the repo: We will use the actions/checkout action to checkout the repository.

Take a look at the checkout action usage here https://github.com/actions/checkout

Then, we have two important initial steps to define. The first one is an official GitHub Action used to check-out a repository so a workflow can access it. The second one it's pretty more complex but, briefly, downloads and set up a requested version of Java.