My Website's Github Actions Workflow

I run this website on an Azure storage account with static site hosting enabled. I’ve found this to be one of the most cost effective ways of running a simple static website (it costs me about $0.07 per month to run two sites). Although there are simpler (and even completely free) options out there like Github pages, I like doing it this way because it gives me a chance to work with real cloud technologies. I wrote a post about how I originally set it up here.

For a while, I’ve been using a shell script to deploy changes to this site. With my SAS token at the ready, I could run ./deploy.sh, answer a couple of prompts, and my changes would get pushed. The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

deploy_website() {
    while [[ $CHOICE != 'Y' && $CHOICE != 'N' ]]; do
        read -p "Deploy to target -- ${HUGO_TARGET}, with storage account -- ${AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT}? [Y/N]: " CHOICE
    done

    if [ $CHOICE = 'Y' ]; then
        echo "Deploying to target ${HUGO_TARGET}..."
        hugo deploy --target=$HUGO_TARGET
        return $?
    fi

    if [ $CHOICE = 'N' ]; then
        echo "Aborting..."
        return 1
    fi
}

read -p 'Storage account name: ' AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT
read -sp 'SAS Token: ' AZURE_STORAGE_SAS_TOKEN
echo
read -p 'Target hugo environment: ' HUGO_TARGET

CHOICE=''
export AZURE_STORAGE_AUTH_MODE="key"
export AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT=$AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT
export AZURE_STORAGE_SAS_TOKEN=$AZURE_STORAGE_SAS_TOKEN

deploy_website

While this worked… there’s a better way.

Github Actions

Essentially, all the script is doing is synchronizing the local public folder in the hugo repo to the blob storage account. It uses hugo’s built in deploy command which, in the background, is just using azcopy.

The problem with the script is:

1. I have to run it manually and paste an SAS token into the prompt every time
2. If I forget to run the command hugo, then no changes get synced because there are no updates to the public folder.

(Yes, I could have added the second part to the script, but I jumped ahead to the better way)

By wrapping all of this functionality into a Github Actions workflow, I could bypass the need to do any of this manually. Just push to main, and my site would get updated. Here’s what the workflow looks like:

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://json.schemastore.org/github-workflow.json
name: Deploy Website to Azure Storage Account
on:
  push:
    paths:
      - "public/**"
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Check out repository code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Install azcopy
        uses: kheiakiyama/install-azcopy-action@v1
        with:
          version: "v10"
      - name: Setup Hugo
        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v3
        with:
          hugo-version: "latest"
      - name: Build site
        run: hugo
      - name: Sync files to Azure storage account
        run: azcopy_v10 sync "./public" "${{ secrets.endpoint_sas_url }}" --recursive --delete-destination=true --from-to LocalBlob

There’s one secret that needs to be set in Github for this action to work – endpoint_sas_url

This is an entire connection string rather than just the SAS token. It’s formatted like this:

https://<storage-account>.blob.core.windows.net/%24web?<sas-token>

NOTE: If you copy this from the azure portal, it may have a $ instead of a %24. The $ needs to be url encoded to %24 or the azcopy command in the action will fail.