Deploying a Gatsby site to GitHub Pages using Actions and Cloudflare

I recently converted this site to be built using Gatsby rather than Hugo. I’ll write about that conversion process separately: this post only concerns the deployment and delivery of the built site. These phases can be basically identical between Hugo, Gatsby, or any other static site generator: at the most basic level it boils down to making a folder of HTML, CSS, and JS available at a URL, 1997-style.

Previously, I was using Travis CI to build the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, then pushing that content to the master branch of the repo, with Cloudflare in front of everything as a CDN.

GitHub Actions

The main change is to use GitHub Actions instead of Travis. I know that GitHub have a tremendous focus on Actions and Marketplace internally, so wanted to use this site as an opportunity to become more familiar with the system.

Deployment meant three things:

1. Build this Gatsby site into production-optimised assets
2. Push those assets to the master branch of the repo (which – when properly configured – results in GitHub pages serving them as a static site)
3. Bust Cloudflare’s cache

Having now created this setup in Travis and in GitHub Actions, these differences are evident:

• GitHub want you to use Marketplace tools rather than hand-crafted bespoke scripts
• Marketplace tools are way more convenient than hand-crafted bespoke scripts (for simple use cases)
• Authentication and secret management is 10x easier in GitHub Actions than Travis or other external CI systems

Build and deploy site

When I was using Travis, I had coded out all the steps necessary to complete this phase:

before_install:
- openssl aes-256-cbc -K $encrypted_3f2dabfde256_key -iv $encrypted_3f2dabfde256_iv
  -in travis_key.enc -out travis_key -d
install:
- wget -O /tmp/hugo.deb https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.69.2/hugo_0.69.2_Linux-64bit.deb
- sudo dpkg -i /tmp/hugo.deb
script:
- ls -lrtA themes
- hugo version
- hugo -v
deploy:
  local_dir: public
  provider: pages:git
  edge: true
  deploy_key: travis_key
  target_branch: master
  fqdn: jmsbrdy.com
  on:
    branch: source

Futz around with encrypted keys, download the Hugo binary onto the builder, install it, build the site, push it to GitHub. You can ignore the ls -lrtA themes and hugo version – I leave them in here because they are evidentially echoes of historical problems I’d been having getting the builder set up properly!

In contrast, with GitHub actions there is an off-the-shelf tool on Marketplace:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1
      - uses: enriikke/gatsby-gh-pages-action@v2.1.1
        with:
          access-token: ${{ secrets.ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          gatsby-args: '--'

The only funky thing here is that I had to pass explicit gatsby-args because otherwise the tool would literally run npm run build "" which fails.

Bust the Cloudflare cache

Again, in Travis this was much more imperative:

after_deploy:
- |
  curl -X DELETE "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/${CF_ZONE_ID}/purge_cache" \
   -H "X-Auth-Email: ${CF_EMAIL}" \
   -H "X-Auth-Key: ${CF_API_KEY}" \
   -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
   --data '{"purge_everything":true}'

In GitHub Actions, it’s declarative:

      - name: Purge Cloudflare cache
        uses: jakejarvis/cloudflare-purge-action@master
        env:
          CLOUDFLARE_ZONE: ${{ secrets.CF_ZONE_ID }}
          CLOUDFLARE_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.CF_API_TOKEN }}

Secret management

Secrets are supported in both Travis and GitHub. However, to enable GitHub repo pushes in Travis, I went through this rigmarole:

• created a keypair
• added the public key to my GitHub account
• encrypted the private key
• saved the encrypted key value to Travis
• changed my .travis.yml to decrypt the key

Now, easier pathways may be available, but note that this is the official recommendation in their instructions and therefore clearly what the folks behind Travis are expecting us to do.

In GitHub Actions, it was as simple as storing a deploy key as a repo secret. Because the Action receives a “hydrated Octokit” as a calling parameter, it’s much more straightforwards for that action to perform privileged GitHub tasks on your behalf.

I’m a fan!