blog VS actions-gh-pages

I noticed that after deployment images were broken after further research it became clear that this happens because we are using baseURL with path - https://imomaliev.github.io/blog/. This is known behavior. It does look like a bug to me, but maintainers decided to close this issue as "wontfix" for now. In the future, I am planning to host this blog on my domain without additional path in baseURL, but for now I fixed it by using relative paths instead ones starting with leading /.

I will start from the very beginning and create this blog from the scratch. This series is called "Building the blog while flying it". In the spirit of famous startup quote/approach, "Building the plane while flying it"1. I think I will have a lot of fun. I am going to start by posting to my dev.to page and host blog repository on the GitHub. My first version of this blog is living in the blog-v1 repo.

Check out the GitHub action you can use for deploying to GitHub pages: https://github.com/peaceiris/actions-gh-pages.

In addition to just sharing the .html generated files which would likely be cumbersome, you can host the docs on github pages and use something like https://github.com/peaceiris/actions-gh-pages + github actions to upload the documentation from your private repository to a public repo (required for non paid users).

I started by using runs-on: ubuntu-22.04 in this workflow to check if everything works ok. It run without any issues. After that I created PRs to add support for ubuntu-22.04 and ubuntu-latest version to GitHub Actions for Hugo and GitHub Pages Action

As a first-step measure, we changed the CI script to overwrite the gh-pages branch at every run, rather than just appending a new commit. We use this gh-pages action, so it was just a matter of adding a force_orphan: true parameter.

Interesting to note that GitHub stores this workflow in the "main" branch under .github/workflows folder. For more details on this Action please refer the documentation and code at https://github.com/peaceiris/actions-gh-pages.

My first workflow is to build and deploy or preview Client, It runs whenever a push or pull request creates for main branch containing changes to the code of client. It install dependencies and builds vue.js app. After build I use peaceiris/actions-gh-pages to deploy it to Github Pages. If the event is Pull Request then deploy to a sub-directory named preview and commit hash and leave a comment on PR.

If the data fetch from previous step succeeds, the workflow continues by building the static website with Hugo. Hugo is setup using action peaceiris/actions-hugo. When the files are ready, the result is published to GitHub pages, using another GitHub action, peaceiris/actions-gh-pages.

peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3 - deploys any folder(s) to gh-pages, can use it for multiple static endpoints

For more information about the actions used and their options, please see Hugo and Github pages on Github.

This quote is quite true. Without automation, we would spend a lot of out time on things that would have to be done repetitively, for example, manually building and deploying your GitHub pages every time there is a change. Luckily, you can easily use GitHub Actions to build and deploy your pages by just pushing your repository to GitHub! You don't even need to do anything except to add a configuration file to your repository. In this post, I will be creating a workflow and using peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3 from GitHub Marketplace (it's free).