Be lazy, automate: GitHub Actions for static blogging
/me: Pablo Iranzo Gómez ( https://iranzo.github.io ) What is a blog?
A place to share knowledge, interests, tips, etc.
Usually features: - images - comments from visitors, - related articles, - etc. What are the costs for a blog?
Web costs money: - Hosting - Domain - Maintenance - etc. What is static blogging?
Generate a static webpage - Think of it as rendering templates into HTML - Has no requirements on the web server, any simple webserver is enough: - Look ma!, no database! - Look ma!, no users! - Look ma!, no security issues! What does it mean to us? We write an article Command for generating html from templates is used New files uploaded to webserver Some Philosophy
Empty your mind, be shapeless, formless, like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle You put water in a teacup, it becomes the teapot Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend
Note: Automation: Be lazy, have someone else doing it for you. Git Hub / Gitlab Lot of source code is hosted at github or gitlab, but it’s a code repository. BUT: We want a website!! Pages come to play Git Hub provides a service called GitHub Pages Git lab provides Gitlab pages
Both provide a ‘static’ webserver to be used for your projects for free 😜
G(H/L) serve from a branch in your repo (usually ‘yourusername.github.io’ repo)
You can buy a domain and point it to your repo. Static doesn’t mean end of fun
There are many ‘static’ content generators that provide rich features: styles links image resizing even ‘search’ Even more fun with external services comments mailing lists etc. Some static generators
Importance of language is for developing ‘plugins’, not content. Jekyll (Ruby) Pelican (Python) Hugo(Go)
They ‘render’ markdown into html There’s even more fun Github provides Jekyll support out of the box. Github, Gitlab, etc allow to plug in third-party CI Github has Actions
Think about endless possibilities!!! What are Github actions? Github is a repository for code Allows third-party integration: Travis, Jenkins, bots, etc Github added GitHub Actions For all repos For free Easy to define new actions ‘clonable’ with just a yaml in the What can we find? CI Formatting Linting Publishing Anything can be combined!! A full Marketplace (https://github.com/marketplace?type=actions) Some food for thought Repos have branches Repos can have automation External automation like Travis CI can do things for you
Note: We’ve all the pieces to push a new markdown file and have it triggering a website update and publish Is a static webpage ugly? There are lot of templates http://www.pelicanthemes.com Each theme has different feature set Choose wisely! (Small screens, html5, etc) If not, changing themes is quite easy: update, and ‘render’ using a new one. Travis-ci.org
Automation for projects: Free for OpenSource projects Configured via .travis.yml Some other settings via Web UI (env vars, etc) Why Actions? Configured within yaml files in the repo GH pre-creates a token that can be used to push new files, branches, etc Without too much hassle, we’ve all the pieces! Wrap up
Ok, automation is ready, our project validates commits, PR’s, website generation…
What else? Test it yourself
Try https://github.com/iranzo/blog-o-matic/
Fork to your repo and get: - minimal setup steps - Automated setup of Pelican + Elegant theme via Git Hub action that builds on each commit. - Ready to be submitted to search engines via sitemap, and web claiming Questions?
Pablo.Iranzo@gmail.com https://iranzo.github.io
