Github actions and CI

I always seem to find myself yak-shaving, and restarting this blog is no different.

If I just wanted to get a blog up, with minimal fuss, I could have used a free Wordpress site, or setup any number of free or low cost self-hosted options.

But for the challenge, and the free-as-in-beer side of me, I decided to try out Github pages. And for extra difficulty points, I wanted to host the Jekyll source in a private Github repo, use Github Actions to build the Jekyll site, and deploy to the gh-pages branch of another public repo.

Took a few hours spread out over a couple of day. Infrastructure related work always seems to take forever, due to the long feedback cycles. Reminds me of the old days, waiting for make to finishing compiling and linking.

Or more recently, all the time I spent tending to Jenkins deployments. Wow, I learned a lot, but that was painful in so many different ways. I’ve been spoiled by Ruby and its fast feedback cycles, helping keep me in flow state.

Anyhow, some Docker files, a small bash script tying everything together, with a lot of head-scratching on how to use ssh auth instead of a personal access token, and I now have an automated setup to build and deploy a Jekyll site from a private repo. No good reason for doing that, other than that I’m am stubborn sometimes, and like to try different things.

Now it’s time to brush up on my CSS and design chops, and start messing with the theme.

Also, it seems to take a minute or two from the deployment to the branch to when the changes show up in browser. I guess I can’t complain, it’s all free!