From CircleCI to GitHub Actions for Jekyll publishing

I’ve been a big fan of static site generation since I switched from WordPress to Jekyll back in 2018. I’m also a big fan of learning new technologies as they come along, and now GitHub Actions are out in the wild; I thought this would be an opportunity to see how I can port my existing custom CircleCI build to Jekyll.

The CircleCI job

A quick recap from part 5 — Hosting & Building, my CircleCI configuration was basically two jobs that have subsequently been tweaked since then. They are:

Build

The build job’s responsibility was to configure a Ruby environment capable of executing Jekyll to build the site, removing the .html extension from the output filenames, and then indexing the content using Algolia. Here is the start of the .circleci/config.yml I was using for that:

{%raw%}version: 2
jobs:
  build:
    docker:
      - image: circleci/ruby:2.6.1
    working_directory: ~/jekyll
    environment:
      - JEKYLL_ENV=production
      - NOKOGIRI_USE_SYSTEM_LIBRARIES=true
      - JOB_RESULTS_PATH=run-results
    steps:
      - checkout
      - restore_cache:
          key: jekyll-{{ .Branch }}-{{ checksum "Gemfile" }}
      - run:
          name: Update gems
          command: gem update --system
      - run:
          name: Install dependencies
          command: bundle check --path=vendor/bundle || bundle install --path=vendor/bundle --jobs=4 --retry=3
      - save_cache:
          key: jekyll-{{ .Branch }}-{{ checksum "Gemfile" }}
          paths:
            - "vendor/bundle"
      - run:
          name: Create results directory
          command: mkdir -p $JOB_RESULTS_PATH
      - run:
          name: Build site
          command: bundle exec jekyll build --config _config.yml,_config-publish.yml 2>&1 | tee $JOB_RESULTS_PATH/build-results.txt
      - run:
          name: Remove .html suffixes
          command: find _site -name "*.html" -not -name "index.html" -exec rename -v 's/\.html$//' {} \;
      - run:
          name: Index with Algolia
          command: bundle exec jekyll algolia --config _config.yml,_config-publish.yml
      - store_artifacts:
          path: run-results/
          destination: run-results
      - persist_to_workspace:
          root: ~/jekyll
          paths:
            - _site
{%endraw%}

Deploy

Deploy takes the output from the build job and syncs it with the S3 bucket I use to publish the site. It then applies AWS S3-specific commands using the AWS CLI tool to ensure metadata, redirects, and caching are correctly set using a Python environment.

{%raw%}  deploy:
    docker:
      - image: circleci/python:2.7
    working_directory: ~/jekyll
    steps:
      - attach_workspace:
          at: ~/jekyll
      - run:
          name: Install AWS CLI
          command: sudo pip install awscli
      - run:
          name: Deploy to S3
          command: aws s3 sync _site s3://damieng-static/ --delete --content-type=text/html
      - run:
          name: Correct MIME for robots.txt automatically
          command: aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/robots.txt s3://damieng-static/robots.txt --metadata-directive="REPLACE"
      - run:
          name: Correct MIME for sitemap.xml automatically
          command: aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/sitemap.xml s3://damieng-static/sitemap.xml --metadata-directive="REPLACE"
      - run:
          name: Correct MIME for Atom feed manually
          command: aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/feed.xml s3://damieng-static/feed.xml --no-guess-mime-type --content-type="application/atom+xml" --metadata-directive="REPLACE"
      - run:
          name: Redirect /damieng for existing RSS subscribers
          command: aws s3api put-object --bucket damieng-static --key "damieng" --website-redirect-location "https://damieng.com/feed.xml"
      - run:
          name: Latest Envy Code R redirect
          command: aws s3api put-object --bucket damieng-static --key "envy-code-r" --website-redirect-location "https://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released"
      - run:
          name: Latest Envy Code R redirect #2
          command: aws s3api put-object --bucket damieng-static --key "fonts/envy-code-r" --website-redirect-location "https://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released"
      - run:
          name: Latest Envy Code R download
          command: aws s3api put-object --bucket damieng-static --key "downloads/latest/EnvyCodeR" --website-redirect-location "https://download.damieng.com/fonts/original/EnvyCodeR-PR7.zip"
      - run:
          name: Correct MIME for CSS files
          command: aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/css/ s3://damieng-static/css/ --metadata-directive="REPLACE" --recursive
{%endraw%}

GitHub Actions

So how could I go about this in GitHub Actions? I have to admit I spent far too long poking around and examining existing Jekyll actions. I have a bunch of steps here I need fine control of, especially around Algolia and S3. I finally ended up on what was quite a simple port.

Unlike the CircleCI configuration, I did not split these into two separate jobs because:

1. There is no exact equivalent to persist_to_workspace and attach_workspace
2. The alternative of storing and restoring the artifacts leaves large useless artifacts around
3. I never ended up running the jobs separately
4. GitHub Actions provides an environment with both Ruby and AWS CLI installed

So, on to the configuration which lives in .github/workflows/jekyll.yml in my case:

{%raw%}name: Build site and deploy

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:
  build:
    name: Build + Deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Setup Ruby
        uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
        with:
          ruby-version: 2.6.1

      - name: Ruby gem cache
        uses: actions/cache@v1
        with:
          path: vendor/bundle
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-gems-${{ hashFiles('**/Gemfile.lock') }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-gems-

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: |
          bundle config path vendor/bundle
          bundle install --jobs 4 --retry 3

      - name: Build Jekyll site
        run:  bundle exec jekyll build --config _config.yml,_config-publish.yml

      - name: Remove .html suffixes except for index.html
        run: find _site -name "*.html" -not -name "index.html" | while read f; do mv "$f" "${f%.html}"; done

      - name: Index with Algolia
        env:
          ALGOLIA_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.ALGOLIA_API_KEY }}
        run:  bundle exec jekyll algolia --config _config.yml,_config-publish.yml

      - name: Configure AWS credentials
        uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v1
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
          aws-region: us-east-1

      - name: Sync site with S3
        run:  aws s3 sync _site s3://damieng-static/ --delete --content-type=text/html

      - name: Correct MIME types
        run: |
          aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/ s3://damieng-static/ --exclude "*" --include "*.txt" --metadata-directive="REPLACE"
          aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/sitemap.xml s3://damieng-static/sitemap.xml --metadata-directive="REPLACE"
          aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/feed.xml s3://damieng-static/feed.xml --no-guess-mime-type --content-type "application/atom+xml" --metadata-directive "REPLACE"
          aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/css/ s3://damieng-static/css/ --metadata-directive "REPLACE" --recursive
          aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/js/ s3://damieng-static/js/ --metadata-directive "REPLACE" --recursive

      - name: Redirect /damieng for existing RSS subscribers
        run:  aws s3api put-object --bucket damieng-static --key "damieng" --website-redirect-location "https://damieng.com/feed.xml"

      - name: Latest Envy Code R redirects
        run:  |
          aws s3api put-object --bucket damieng-static --key "fonts/envy-code-r" --website-redirect-location "https://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released"
          aws s3api put-object --bucket damieng-static --key "downloads/latest/EnvyCodeR" --website-redirect-location "https://download.damieng.com/fonts/original/EnvyCodeR-PR7.zip"

      - name: Set caching for images at 30 days
        run:  aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/ s3://damieng-static/ --exclude "*" --include "*.svg" --include "*.ico" --include "*.jpg" --include "*.png" --include "*.webp" --include "*.gif" --recursive --metadata-directive REPLACE --expires 2034-01-01T00:00:00Z --acl public-read --cache-control max-age=2592000,public

      - name: Set caching for CSS and JS at 1 hour
        run:  aws s3 cp s3://damieng-static/ s3://damieng-static/ --exclude "*" --include "*.css" --include "*.js" --recursive --metadata-directive REPLACE --expires 2034-01-01T00:00:00Z --acl public-read --cache-control max-age=3600,public
{%endraw%}

I also took the opportunity to fix a long-running issue in that my S3 objects would lose my manually-applied cache settings (and new posts and files would not have any).

Gotchas

There were only a couple of bumps in the road once I decided on a straight-port rather than trying to leverage higher-level existing actions:

1. The secrets configured in the repo settings were not automatically exposed to the commands running in the action. Instead, you have to expose them using the ${{ secrets.KEY_NAME }} syntax.
2. I was using rename instead of mv. I don’t recall why. Perhaps it was my Windows-ness creeping in. Rename has been dropped in newer distros.

Summary

The syntax is surprisingly similar with build-times about the same as CircleCI. It’s just nice to have it in one place. Time to port some other repos over!

[)amien