Un peu de math

A post showing how to deploy a static site using github actions.

Deploying a static site (built with R and Python) via github actions

2020-10-18

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This blog is a static site with source files written in markdown, Jupyter or R markdown. Up until this post I have always generated the html locally and push that to github which in turn serves the pages using Github pages: https://pages.github.com.

In this blog post I will describe how to use Github Actions https://github.com/features/actions to not only build the static files but also deploy them.

The repo for this blog is available here: https://github.com/drvinceknight/blog and this is what the structure looks like:

LICENSE
README.md
_build/
assets/
|--- css/
|--- img/
blog-env/
requirements.txt
setup.R
src
|--- posts/
    |--- 2018-07-10-just-enough-static-site-generator
    |--- 2018-07-11-examining-the-relationship-between-student-performance-and-video-interactions
    |--- 2018-11-23-zipping-iterators
    |--- 2018-11-26-galton-board
    |--- 2018-12-19-continuous-time-markov-chains
    |--- 2019-04-03-testing-zd
    |--- 2019-05-06-making-kernel-available-to-jupyter
    |--- 2019-05-24-reproducing-axelrods-first-tournament
    |--- 2020-02-26-computing-nash-equilibria-in-R
    |--- 2020-10-18-deploying-via-github-actions
tasks.py
.github/workflows/

To use github actions we need to put a configuration file in the .github/workflows/ directory.

In this file we include the specific instructions to build and deploy the site when the main branch is altered (this is my default branch) and push to the gh-pages branch which I have set to be served via github actions:

name: deploy

# Only run this when the main branch changes
on:
  push:
    branches:
    - main
    paths:
    - src/**
    - assets/**

# This job installs dependencies, build the site, and pushes it to `gh-pages``
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2

    # Install python
    - name: Set up Python 3.8
      uses: actions/setup-python@v1
      with:
        python-version: 3.8
    # Install R
    - name: Set up R 4.0.3
      uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v1
      with:
        r-version: 4.0.3

    - name: Install python dependencies
      run: |
        python -m pip install -U pip
        python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

    - name: Install R dependencies
      run: |
        Rscript setup.R

    # Build the site
    - name: Build the site
      run: |
        python -m invoke build

    # Push the book's HTML to github-pages
    - name: GitHub Pages action
      uses: peaceiris/[email protected]
      with:
        github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        publish_dir: ./_build/

This setting is accessible via the specific repository's settings page.

There are three bespoke tasks:

• Install python dependencies: python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
• Install R dependencies: Rscript setup.R
• Build the site: python -m invoke build

This latter task makes use of the python library invoke http://www.pyinvoke.org which is similar to make and allows me to abstract the specific task of going through all the files in posts. Depending on the suffix (.md, .ipynb or .Rmd) the html file is built and moved to _build. Finally, all the assets (including images) are also moved to _build.

The other tasks are all github actions that:

• Install Python
• Install R
• Put the contents of _build on the gh-pages branch. Note that all other files are not on that branch.

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A blog about programming (usually scientific python), mathematics (usually game theory) and learning (usually student centred pedagogic approaches).

Source code: drvinceknight Twitter: @drvinceknight Email: [email protected] Powered by: Python mathjax highlight.js Github pages Bootstrap