GitHub Action - Hexo CI/CD 🌱

This Github Action automating hexo deployment workflow, to allow you to leverage GitHub Actions to publish your hexo site on Github Pages.

🍑Usage

🍄Pre-requisites

Step 1: Setup Deploy keys and Secrets

The with portion of the workflow must be configured before the action will work. You can add these in the with section found in the example workflow below. Any secrets must be referenced using the bracket syntax and stored in the GitHub repositories Settings/Secrets menu. You can learn more about setting environment variables with GitHub actions here.

🥕How to add your ssh key pair?

1. Run the following terminal command, replacing the email with one connected to your GitHub account.

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "[email protected]"

2. In Github Pages repo: Add the contents of the public key within your repositories deploy keys menu. You can find this option by going to Settings > Deploy Keys, you can name the public key whatever you want, but you do need to give it write access.
3. In hexo source code repo: Add the contents of the private key to the Settings > Secrets menu as DEPLOY_KEY.

Step 2: Configure github workflows

Create a workflow .yml file in your .github/workflows directory. An example workflow is available below. For more information, reference the GitHub Help Documentation for Creating a workflow file.

🍆Inputs

For more information on these inputs, see the API Documentation

Key	Required	Description	Default
user_name	NO	The user name of your github account for deploying.	github-actions[bot]
user_email	NO	The user email of your github account for deploying.	41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com1
deploy_key	YES	The deploy key to access your GitHub Pages repository.	null
commit_msg	NO	Git commit messages for your GitHub Pages repository.	null

• [1] 41898282 is the user ID for github-actions[bot]. Ref Github API.

Tips:

• user_name and user_email: Github Actions bot is just a bot account to perform these operations so that users would know that they were triggered by automation. There is an known issue if you use this bot account. In your GitHub Pages repository, if you want to filter commits by author, it will return a wrong result: No commits found for "github-actions[bot]". You can avoid such error by using your github account instead of default bot account.
• commit_msg: For Hexo official, the commit message is default to Site updated: {{ now('YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss') }}. But for users who actually need to keep commit history, they may not need such one. So the recommended setting is ${{ github.event.head_commit.message }} so that you can transfer commit messages to the GitHub Pages repository directly. If you prefer the default commit message, it is unnecessary to set in your workflow file or set commit_msg to default. For users who don’t want any commit history, you can set commit_msg to none. Since default and none are reserved words for control, you cannot set the commit message to these two words alone.

🥒Outputs

For more information on these outputs, see the API Documentation for an example of what these outputs look like

• notify: Deploy complate notification.

🍌Example workflow - hexo deploy

On every push to this repo, generate hexo sites and publish on username.github.io repo.

name: Deploy

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: A job to deploy blog.
    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v1
      with:
        submodules: true # Checkout private submodules(themes or something else).
    
    # Caching dependencies to speed up workflows. (GitHub will remove any cache entries that have not been accessed in over 7 days.)
    - name: Cache node modules
      uses: actions/cache@v4
      id: cache
      with:
        path: node_modules
        key: ${{ runner.os }}-node-${{ hashFiles('**/package-lock.json') }}
        restore-keys: |
          ${{ runner.os }}-node-
    - name: Install Dependencies
      if: steps.cache.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'
      run: npm ci
    
    # Deploy hexo blog website.
    - name: Deploy
      id: deploy
      uses: MultiChen/[email protected]
      with:
        deploy_key: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_KEY }}
        user_name: your github username  # (or delete this input setting to use bot account)
        user_email: your github useremail  # (or delete this input setting to use bot account)
        commit_msg: ${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}  # (or delete this input setting to use hexo default settings)
    # Use the output from the `deploy` step(use for test action)
    - name: Get the output
      run: |
        echo "${{ steps.deploy.outputs.notify }}"

🌽How to install additional third party node modules?

1. Add them as dependencies in the package.json file under your site's working directory.
2. Regenerate the package-lock.json file to cache them in your Install Dependencies step.

🐔Recommand Hexo Repository Settings

🥚Custom domain with CNAME

If your Github Pages needs to use a CNAME file to customize the domain name, put the CNAME file in the source directory, only then can hexo deploy push the CNAME file to the deployment repository.

🐣Make your hexo repository private

Hide your hexo source repository from the public to protect your website.

🐤Use submodule in your hexo repository

Add any hexo themes branch as gitmodules.

# Add submodule
$ git submodule add https://github.com/theme-next/hexo-theme-next themes/next

# Get tags list
$ cd themes/next
$ git tag -l
…
v6.0.0
v6.0.1
v6.0.2
...

# Switch on v6.0.1 tagged release version
$ git checkout tags/v6.0.1
Note: checking out 'tags/v6.0.1'.
…
HEAD is now at da9cdd2... Release v6.0.1

# If you want to switch on latest release version without defining tag (optional)
$ git checkout $(git describe --tags $(git rev-list --tags --max-count=1))

🐥Use Hexo-Way to store theme configuration options in site config file (hexo/_config.yml)

Copy needed theme options from theme config file into site config file, then

1. Move all this settings to the right with two spaces (in Visual Studio Code: select all strings, CTRL + ]).
2. Add theme_config: parameter above all this settings.

You can learn more about overriding theme config here.

🕊License

The scripts and documentation in this project are released under the MIT License