How this site was created

jekyllssg March 12, 2021

Publishing a site using an SSG from GitHub Actions

After using Wordpress for several years (on-off), I decided to move to SSG (Static Site Generator) I come to love markdown, and the ability to write my posts from VS Code directly.

So, here I will just give a high level overwiew of what takes to create a simple site using SSG.

Toolset

docsy-jekyll

After reviewing some static site generators, jekyll brought my attention due to its simplicity, and cute Liquid scripting language.
Close came docusaurus and nanoc

If you are new to the world of site generators, this could be a good start:
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/06/03/ssg-overview-gitlab-pages-part-1-dynamic-x-static/

docsy-jekyll is a well done mixture of jekyll and docsy and nice-looking theme.

To start using docsy-jekyll, just go their GitHub repo, click on ‘Use this Template’. Read the readme file, it comes with useful stuff.

GitHub Actions

The CI/CD job should do 3 main tasks:

  1. Checkout code
steps:    
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
  1. Build the site
 - name: Build site with docker-compose
      run: docker-compose up

Note that default docker-compose.yaml comes with the serve comand. So, change it to only build:

   #command: jekyll serve --no-watch --drafts --incremental
   command: jekyll build
  1. Publish to your hosting account
 - name: ftp-action
      uses: sebastianpopp/ftp-action@v2.0.0
      with: 
        host: my-domain.com
        user: <ftp_user>@my-domain.com
        password: <ftp_user_password>
        localDir: ./_site
        remoteDir: .

Note: Lately this stop working, so I switched to library: SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@4.0.0>

Hosting account

I used my own domain hosting company to hosts the site.
But, you can use also GitHub Pages to host it.