GitHub Actions to build this website

Two days ago I finally managed to get my GitLab CI configuration to the point where it did everything that I wanted. It builds the site, generates the blogroll, updates the search indexes on Algolia, and finally sends out webmentions for all changed articles.

For the last weeks or so I spent more time in GitHub Actions, though, thanks to projects like webmentiond and covid19-aut-stats which I have running on GitHub in order to make them more accessible for contributors (among other reasons). None of them has a particular elaborated workflow and so I thought I should try porting the build pipeline I have for this website over.

Turns out, the experience was much smoother than I had anticipated. The biggest challenge was to remember that I had to explicitly inject secrets using ${{ secrets.SECRET_NAME }}. As you might expect, the final workflow looks pretty similar to what I had on GitLab and they also take about the same time: ~ 4m on both systems.

To get there, though, I had to fine-tune one particular aspect of the GitHub workflow: Since I pass the public folder that Hugo generates, around between dependent jobs, I use the upload-artifact action quite a lot. Turns out, this one really doesn’t like working with that many files and so I’m now packaging the folder before uploading it:

    - run: tar -cJf public.tar.xz public
    - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v1
      with:
        name: public.tar.xz
        path: public.tar.xz

This small change has speed up the upload from 3m34s to 28s + 18s. Sure, compressing and decompressing adds some overhead, but 46s is still far better than 214s 😉 I’m pretty sure, I’ll be able to get a couple more seconds out of the whole workflow once I feel more familiar with GitHub Actions.

This also means, that for the time being, https://github.com/zerok/zerokspot.com is the canonical repository of this website