GitHub Action for Publishing

[dendron-bot]

Goals

Create github action for publishing to github pages

Context

It takes many steps to setup a pipeline that involves a github action. If the user has remote private vaults, this becomes all the more problematic because they would require that github be able to pull their workspace.

Proposal

Create a github action that wraps up Dendron's publishing logic in a github action.

Details

The current workflow for using github action is described here: [[GitHub Action|dendron://dendron.dendron-site/dendron.topic.publishing-next.cook.github-action]]

The limitation with the above workflow: it does not work with private repositories since the action doesn't have access to pull from private repositories.
Specifically, dendron workspace init will fail when it tries to pull from a private repository.

Lookup

It might be a good idea to fork the MIT licensed checkout action [^checkout] since it already has the ability to checkout a git repository with a access token or ssh key and configure it with the local git so that it can run authenticated command.

Example

A user could use Dendron's publish action by using the following

name: Dendron

on:
  push:
    branches:
    - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout source
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Build notes
      uses: dendronhq/actions-publish
      with:
        github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        # if not set, docs/ by default
        publish_dir: ""
        # empty if not set
        cname: ""

    - name: Deploy site
      uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
      with:
        github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        publish_branch: pages
        publish_dir: docs/
        force_orphan: true

Not in Scope

• checking out the repo, we will rely on the builtin checkout action [^checkout]
• publishing to github, we will rely on gh pages action[^gh-pages]

[checkout]: GitHub - actions/checkout: Action for checking out a repo
[gh-pages]: GitHub - peaceiris/actions-gh-pages: GitHub Actions for GitHub Pages 🚀 Deploy static files and publish your site easily. Static-Site-Generators-friendly.