I recently needed to set up an automatic or continuous deployment to a project I was working on and I needed to use Github actions. Being my first time I went online to read up on it a bit and also watched some Youtube videos, however I couldn’t understand everything well so I explained my need to chatGPT, it’s answer was enough to get me started but I needed to do some important changes on my own before my CI worked.
Here are my steps.
Create a Github workflow directory in the root of your project
./github/workflow
Add a yml file for you workflow
deploy.yml
I’m using deploy because the workflow is for deploying my project
Now you need to define your workflow in the deploy.yml file
`name: Deploy Website
on:
push:
branches:
– main # Change this to your main branch name if different
jobs:
deploy:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
– name: Checkout code
uses: actions/checkout@v2
– name: SSH into EC2 instance and deploy
uses: appleboy/ssh-action@master
with:
host: ${{ secrets.EC2_HOST }}
username: ${{ secrets.EC2_USERNAME }}
key: ${{ secrets.EC2_SSH_KEY }}
script: |
cd /path/to/project
git pull
sudo pm2 stop app
sudo yarn build
sudo pm2 restart app
`
Now the easy part is over, lets get into some ssh madness
Set up ssk key
login to your ec2 instance ssh and run the following commands to generate ssh key pair
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C “your_email@example.com”
you need to get your secret key to add to your github actions. Open the private key file (~/.ssh/id_rsa) with a text editor and copy its contents. Then, go to your GitHub repository and navigate to Settings > Secrets. Click on “New repository secret” and add a new secret with the name EC2_SSH_KEY and paste the contents of the private key file into the value field.
Finally, Add Secrets to GitHub Repository: In your GitHub repository, go to Settings > Secrets and add the following secrets:
EC2_HOST: The IP address or domain name of your EC2 instance.
EC2_USERNAME: The username to log in to your EC2 instance.
