Building My Blog with GitHub Actions

2020-01-08

So I Changed My DevOps

As some may know, I already had a fully working CI/CD process for my blog and it was running on Azure Pipelines. As someone that is always learning and wanting to play with a new tool, I was pretty intrigued when GitHub Actions was formally announced at GitHub Universe. I wanted to see how challenging it would be to move my DevOps process from Azure Pipelines to GitHub Actions and it was not hard at all.

Actions 101

If you aren't familar, GitHub Actions is the mechanism inside of GitHub for CI/CD (they call them workflows) and is written in [YAML [Yet Another Markup Language]](https://yaml.org/). If you read the [docs](https://help.github.com/en/actions/automating-your-workflow-with-github-actions), you can take a look at the structures that make up a workflow and even choose from a ton of existing Actions that have been developed my Third-Party Vendors, or community members as well, so even though you can create them yourself, you have the ability to leverage hundreds of them to build a workflow that fits your needs.

Making a Workflow to Fit My Needs

The first thing that I did in building my workflow was to identify the steps to get my app from source to a static-site in Azure Blob Storage. It isn't hard but all I have to do is Build and Deploy

Build the app using Hugo Cli
Deploy built bits to specific container in Azure Blob Storage

Way too simple here, so now that I have this, I need to determine what I need in my workflow to complete this. Funny enough both these steps exist as created Actions in the Marketplace, so I then just need to specify when this Action runs and what platform it runs on (in my case Ubuntu).

All in all, my action looks like this.

```yaml name: Build and Publish Blog to Azure Blob Storage

on: [push]

jobs: build:

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@master
  - uses: chabad360/hugo-actions@master
    with:
      buildPath: 'public'
      hugoVersion: ''
      args: ''
  - uses: bacongobbler/azure-blob-storage-upload@v1.0.0
    with:
      source_dir: public
      container_name: $web
      connection_string: ${{ secrets.ConnString }}
      extra_args: ''

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The only things to call out here is that I have a "secret" stored in GitHub (my connection string for blob storage) that I can easily reference from the workflow.

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The workflow itself is saved on the GitHub repo, in a folder called `.github/workflows` and the Actions frame reads that file whenever a commit is made. The `on` is important because it specifies that we should run this function EVERYTIME there is a commit (true CI/CD 😜).
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## Run The Thing

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Similar to other CI tools, GitHub Actions has a dashboard where you can view the status of all the workflows that have been ran (for instance for this blog, it is [here](https://github.com/isaacrlevin/LevinBlog/actions))




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From here, I can drill into the logs and see all the things that take place to get my code published, pretty awesome!





## There You Have It

<br />
That was super easy and fun. Remember, GitHub Actions is brand new and there are only going to be more things added to it to make it a complete end-to-end solution for CI/CD, I look forward to seeing where it goes. Feel free to take it for a spin!!!