By default, GitHub uses Jekyll for their site generator which is fine,
but it has some issues and the complexity is not really worth it for me.
You could argue that Jekyll is simple, which it is to some degree,
but it can become complicated quite quickly if you start adding your
own spin on things.
A while ago I wrote a simple static site generator called "jbmafp -
Just Build Me A Fucking Page"
which was a protest against Hugo. Hugo is fine but
again, if you try doing something that conflicts with the dogma they
prescribe you are in trouble.
I also moved this blog from self-hosted virtual machine to just GitHub
Pages. I didn't want to bother myself managing that server anymore. And
this presented a slight problem because I didn't want to use the default
_docs folder GitHub wants you to use, and I also didn't want to upload
public folder that gets generated to GitHub.
Thankfully, there is a way to use custom software to generate your site
like jbmafp.
To achieve this you need to create a file .github/workflows/deploy.yaml
in the root of your repository.
name: Build and Deploy to Pages
on:
push:
branches: ["master"]
workflow_dispatch:
permissions:
contents: read
pages: write
id-token: write
concurrency:
group: "pages"
cancel-in-progress: false
jobs:
deploy:
environment:
name: github-pages
url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Setup Pages
uses: actions/configure-pages@v3
- name: Run a multi-line script
run: |
wget https://github.com/mitjafelicijan/jbmafp/releases/download/v0.1/jbmafp.zip
unzip jbmafp.zip
chmod +x jbmafp
./jbmafp -b
- name: Upload artifact
uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v2
with:
path: './public'
- name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
id: deployment
uses: actions/deploy-pages@v2
This is an example for jbmafp. When I execute ./jbmafp -b the program
creates public folder and puts all content there. And the directive
with: path: './public' tells actions/deploy-pages@v2 to look for
public folder instead of docs folder.
This can be used with anything, actually. Hugo, Gatsby, Astro, you
name it.