Automatically build and deploy projects with GitHub Actions

In an effort to consolidate and save a little bit of money I’ve recently moved all my projects off DeployHQ and moved them to a free alternative: GitHub Actions.

I work almost exclusively on WordPress plugins and themes that use a combination of Composer and Node scripts, and I want to automatically run these scripts and deploy the built files to my server over SSH. In this post, I’ll share how I accomplished this with GitHub Actions in just a few lines of code.

In your GitHub repository, create a new file in the .github/workflows folder called deploy.yml with the following content:

name: Deploy
on:
    push:
        branches:
            - main
jobs:
    build:
        runs-on: ubuntu-latest
        steps:
            - name: Checkout code
              uses: actions/checkout@v3
            - name: Setup PHP
              uses: shivammathur/setup-php@v2
              with:
                  php-version: '8.3'
                  coverage: none
            - name: Install Composer dependencies
              run: composer install --no-dev
            - name: Setup Node.js
              uses: actions/setup-node@v3
              with:
                  node-version: '18'
            - name: Install npm dependencies
              run: npm install
            - name: Build
              run: npm run build
            - name: Deploy to server via SSH
              env:
                  SSH_PRIVATE_KEY: ${{ secrets.SSH_KEY }}
                  SERVER_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.SSH_USER }}
                  SERVER_HOST: ${{ secrets.SSH_SERVER }}
                  DEPLOY_DIR: ${{ secrets.SSH_PATH }}
              run: |
                  mkdir -p ~/.ssh
                  echo "$SSH_PRIVATE_KEY" > ~/.ssh/id_rsa
                  chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa
                  ssh-keyscan -H $SERVER_HOST >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts

                  rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no" --exclude-from='.distignore' ./ $SERVER_USERNAME@$SERVER_HOST:$DEPLOY_DIR

mkdir -p .github/workflows

This action takes a few different steps in order, whenever a new commit is pushed to main:

1. Check out the current repository
2. Install PHP (you can replace 8.3 with your desired PHP version)
3. Install Composer dependencies (uses --no-dev which ensures no dev dependencies get installed)
4. Install npm
5. Run the npm build script (replace npm run build with your own build script if necessary)
6. Use rsync to copy files to your remote server over SSH

To make this work, you need to set a few secrets in the repository settings.

Set the following secrets:

 ssh-keygen -m PEM -t rsa -b 4096

The last rsync step looks a little complicated, but is actually fairly straightforward. It creates a new ~/.ssh folder (where your SSH keys are stored), copies the private key to this folder, gives it the correct permissions and connects to your server to get the known hosts.

It then copies the files over using rsync, while ignoring any files that are present in the .distignore file in your repository root. This is super useful to prevent copying over files you don’t want or need. Here’s an example:

bin
node_modules
src
.*
composer.json
composer.lock
license.txt
README.md
package.json
package-lock.json
webpack.config.js

Add the .distignore file to your own repository root and choose which files and folders to ignore— these will not be copied over when the action is run.

Hopefully this helps you deploy your own projects using GitHub Actions! If you want to learn more about actions and see what else is possible I encourage you to check out the official docs.