Why Automate Stuff?

I have recently been developing my Gatsby sites on various platforms, osx, windows, and between them linux via docker.

My main goal is the ability to do gatsby build and gh-pages -d public -b master without issues between platforms

what kind of issues am i talking about?

Because of that I found it helpful to just use docker and docker-compose to run the build command

Now there are ways to avoid that as well, mainly using docker volumes to isolate the node modules between platforms, but it still didnt feel right

Github Actions

Then i found Github Actions

According to github using them you can automate any software development process.

You do that by adding a workflow configuration file to your git repo, then based on that file github will do your bidding. It can do all kinds of things for you:

Talk about convienient!

Now This will work, let see what it will take to setup a workflow to just build and deploy my gatsby sites.

First we need to give our worklow a name:

name: Build and Deploy Gatsby

Luckily the syntax is pretty easy, so to start you need to tell it when to run, I want it to run when i push changes to my develop branch, other branchs that arent master are branchs for features and bugs, and the master branch i deploy the site to so it sould only run the builds when i push to the develop branch.

Here is how to do it:

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - develop      

Ok now we define our jobs, i say jobs because we can have multiple but i only have one

To define jobs you have a top-level jobs key whose value is a mapping and the key is the jobs name and its value is another mapping to define the job, my jos name is build

jobs: 
  build:    

To define a job it needs a name, it needs to know what kind of platform to run on and it needs a list of steps to run

    name: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:

To define a step you have a few options you can:

for our first step we checkout our repo using a predefined action from github

      - name: checkout 
        uses: actions/checkout@v1

our next step installs our dependencies

      - name: install
        run: yarn install 

the next step runs yarn build which is an alias for gatsby build --prefix-paths

      - name: build
        run: yarn build

Finally i deploy it to github pages using another predefined action, but because its pushing to our repo it needs an api token, but luckily github provides one as secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN you just need to add it as an environment variable

      - name: deploy
        uses: maxheld83/ghpages@v0.2.1
        env: 
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} 
          BUILD_DIR: 'public/'