• Tuesday, 19 Sep 2023 10:25 pm

  Manual deploys

  This website has been deploying using a GitHub Action for a little while now. The idea is that when I push new changes, the website should pull those changes down from GitHub and then do a little song and dance to install dependencies and bust caches. Simple enough.

  Or so you'd think! I struggled for a while to figure out a good way to handle this—using Deployer, trying to find a cheaper alternative to Forge, finally settling on what felt to me like a bit of an icky method: getting GitHub to SSH directly into my VPS and run the commands. This necessitated putting credentials in a GitHub "Secret", which I'm sure has top-notch security but felt like an unnecessary broadening of my attack surface.

  Well, no longer. The GitHub Action, after 250-odd runs, is no more. Instead, I've written a simple bash script that runs the deployment commands, and which I trigger from my computer instead. Manually SSH-ing into my server and running the command explicitly would be tiresome, so I've written a small alias for it instead:

  alias deploy='f() { ssh <my-server> "cd /path/to/www/$1 && ./deploy.sh" };f'
  

  which I can then run pretty simply:

  $ deploy charlesharri.es
  

  There are a few benefits to doing it this way:

  • I'm a lot more deliberate about re-deploying my site
  • I don't have to keep secrets on GitHub
  • I don't have to debug GitHub Actions when something invariably falls over
  • I can redeploy arbitrary sites on the same server, so long as they have an executable deploy.sh script at the project root

  #3 is the big one for me; time will tell how much more or less productive this workflow actually is. I suspect it's not going to make much of a difference.

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