Building and deploying a custom site using GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages

I did something similar recently for deploying some Bevy examples to a webpage: https://github.com/victorb/dogoap/blob/3505cb42784381b696ce5...

Probably not a problem unless you work with others or have a tendency to push commits fast/have a slow pipeline (building WASM from Rust is really slow), but it seems you're missing to limit the concurrency, which can lead to old commit being deployed over a newer commit, depending on which finishes first.

Also limiting it to your main/master branch makes sense in case you use branches, otherwise WIP branches might deploy over your "production" one :)

One final word of advice, try to do as little as possible in the .yml configuration itself (I see Simon is "emulating" the build process inside of the CI config), as testing changes becomes a huge hassle otherwise. Instead, extract it into a shell-script/Makefile/Justfile or something, then call that from your CI config, so you can also run the same code locally.

The simplicity of the example might give the wrong impression here. A Github action that produces some static HTML is of course without value, Github pages can host HTML files without needing any workflow action. The idea of the article seems to be that the Github action file can do something interesting regularly, like downloading a json file from somewhere, then produce a page and publish it. That is kind of neat then, as you can have your static site generator offloaded to Github's architecture - instead of needing to run that somewhere else, like your own PC or a dedicated server.

I've used GitHub Pages for a long time to serve sites for free, notably https://asciiflow.com, however I have recently moved it and other sites to CloudFlare Pages - it's also got a very generous free tier and many other useful features that GH pages lacks. Setup is simple - https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow/blob/main/.github%2Fwork...

GitHub Actions is just great, and I think people overlook again how much you can do for free! As the author highlights, I use it for running workflows on a schedule, which you can use to rebuild static sites hourly, so they aren't so static after all.

https://codename-recon.github.io/Gridlock/

I just set up an apt repo of uv packages using GitHub Pages via Actions and wrote up some notes here: https://linsomniac.com/post/2025-03-18-building_and_publishi...

Looks like Simon and I were working on very similar things simultaneously.

The thing about GitHub Pages is that it doesn't handle redirects and index pages the way I like, besides being quite a bit slow when you have thousands of static items (I ended up building my own custom uploader to Azure storage, which only rebuilds the pages I update and figures out all the asset dependencies, so it also only uploads the bits that need updating).