Deploying Automatically using GitHub Actions

I recently picked up a Pixel Slate computer/tablet (I might write a short review for it but in the meantime check out this thread) and I wanted to see if I could configure my personal site, this site, so I could write a blog post, publish and deploy it all from my new computer. I also haven't setup the linux partition on the device yet either so I wanted to be able to do all of this from within Chrome.

Before I dive into how I setup this flow, I wanted to provide some insight into this site. Its a Gatsby site, where most of my posts are authored using MDX, feel free to check out the source code for the site here: https://github.com/hamlim/blog-2k19. I am also using Zeit's now product to deploy the site and alias it to the current url. In order to automate deployments I would need to have Gatsby build the site, and then deploy using now.

A while back I signed up for the GItHub Actions beta, and somehow got access to it too! I have been fumbling around with it for the past few weeks, not really putting enough time into it to learn how to fully configure a workflow. So this new challenge provided the necessity to actually learn how to configure these workflows and actions.

At a high level, the mixed manual and automated process looks like this:

• Author blog posts in Notion in their web app
• Carry the blog post over to Github, where I use their online IDE to add a new entry
• Open a PR with the new blog post, review it for any grammar issues, typos, etc
• Merge the PR to master
• Kickoff a push GitHub workflow that does the following
  • Filter out pushes to other branches, so it only runs on master
  • Install dependencies using Yarn
  • Run yarn build
  • Deploy using now
  • Alias the site using a local now.json file in the repo to my matthamlin.me domain
• See the updated content on the public site!

I am using the following actions created by several others available on the Actions marketplace:

• GitHub Action for Yarn: https://github.com/nuxt/actions-yarn
• GitHub Action for Now: https://github.com/actions/zeit-now

Check out the workflow here!