Deploy Hugo Site Using GitHub Actions

After creating a new project using Hugo’s Quick Start guide, you can then deploy to GitHub Pages.

Git Branches

For this site, we are deploying the project hosted at napjoseph/napjoseph.github.io.

Since this is an Organization Pages-type repository, we will be using following branches for our workflow:

$ git branch
master           # the branch that GitHub pages will serve the files from
stable           # the main development branch where all pull requests will be merged to
id_your_feature  # additional development branches for new features

Add your Deploy Key

Follow the tutorial over at peaceiris/actions-gh-pages and add an SSH deploy key for your project.

Create your GitHub Action

Afterwards, create a directory for your workflows and add the config file for your new action.

$ mkdir -p .github/workflows
$ touch .github/workflows/deploy.yml

# file: .github/workflows/deploy.yml

name: deploy-to-master

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - stable

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          persist-credentials: false

      - name: Update theme
        run: git submodule update --init --recursive

      - name: Setup Hugo
        uses: peaceiris/[email protected]
        with:
          hugo-version: '0.74.3'

      - name: Build
        run: HUGO_ENV=production hugo --minify

      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/[email protected]
        with:
          deploy_key: ${{ secrets.ACTIONS_DEPLOY_KEY }}
          publish_dir: ./public
          publish_branch: master
          keep_files: false
          allow_empty_commit: true

Deployment

After merging your pull requests to the stable branch, it should automatically deploy to the master branch.