Have ever seen yourself in this situation, where you are developing a Select component, and you're not quite right the interaction you've built is good enough? So you need to share what you've built so far with your UX/UI/QA team, just to see if you're following in the right direction?

You probably solved this by having a call with your designer or maybe sharing the link via ngrok. But everyone know how time consuming it is to do those things everytime you introduce a new change.

So why not deploy a new version of your app automatically? If your application is mainly static, this should be super easy, right? You could host it in S3, Netlify and even in Github-Pages.

And that's what this action do. The main difference is that it organizes your apps, by branch, so every developer working in your repo can have it's dedicated app!

This action manages the "github pages" branch, so you can host multiple apps inside the same app. It will manage the build artifacts and organize it by branch/commit inside the github pages branch.

1. Enable github-pages source branch by following this guide: https://pages.github.com

2. Create a new workflow with all the proper build preparations and add the following step. (the build will happen inside the action, but make sure all dependencies are installed previously)

Example of usage:

# See .github/workflows/example.yml
  steps:
     - name: Build and deploy to gh-pages
        uses: sauloxd/[email protected] # replace with correct version
        with:
          build-cmd: 'yarn build'
          branch: 'gh-pages' # The branch you chose to be your github-pages source
          dist: 'build' # The dist folder where your "yarn build" command will place the build artifacts
          slug: 'react' # The partial URL where your apps will live. This is useful if you want to deploy both your react app and storybook app inside the same repository

3. If the action succeeds, your review apps will live in https://{ username }.github.io/{ repository }/react/{ branchName }/{ commitId }.

If you want to also deploy, for example, a storybook app, just add another step with a different slug and it will have it's unique url for it!

4. The CLEANUP will only happen when the action receives an event of PR closed. Currently there is no other way, unless you manually remove the app yourself in the github pages branch.

Since you can use this action the way you want, I'll share the way I envisioned this when I created this.

Probably you don't want to constantly (re)build your app on every PUSH (like in the workflow in this repo, which was built for developing it), but only per PR created, when it's almost done. Even better, to avoid unnecessary computations, you can configure this action to only run on specific PR labels, like storybook or Review App. (see this examle)

That said, the only way out of an open PR is a closed PR, and thats when this action will delete the branch namespace in github action branch.

This is probably not useful for hosting the production version of the app, so keep that in mind.

Required The command used for building your app. Internally we will pass a PUBLIC_URL env var with the correct path prefix, so your application can live in a nested URL besides the root. If don't use hashRouting you'll probably need to do some adjustments. See PUBLIC_URL in FAQ bellow

Default: gh-pages. The GithubPages source branch. Follow this guide https://pages.github.com for more info. ⚠️This action will not work if this branch is not properly configured!

Default: dist The output directory for your build command. It's usually the dist folder at the root of your project, but could be somewhere else (see the example.yml workflow in this repo)

Default: review-apps The name for each type of app you'll deploy. This needs to be unique per repository. This is only useful if you want to deploy multiple apps (e.g. you main app and a storybook app)

1. How to set an empty branch for my github-pages source branch?

I recommend using an orphan-branch, to avoid some collisions with file/dir names etc.

BRANCH_NAME=gh-pages # Change to a desired branch name
git checkout --orphan $BRANCH_NAME
git rm -rf .
echo "Github pages branch" > README.md
git add README.md
git commit -m "First commit xD"
git push origin $BRANCH_NAME

2. My images and my navigation links inside my app is not working

This is probably because you're app is not prepared to be served in a prefixed URL. For example, in ReactRouter, if you don't configure a basename in <Router /> component, it will not append the prefix in the links it generates. See the examples in this repo:

• Create-react-app with React-router - link
• Gatsby example with path-prefix config - link

When building your app, we will provide a env var with the correct path prefix:

PUBLIC_URL=`/{ repositoryName }/{ slug }/{ branchName }/{ headCommit }`);

So you can consume it in your app, like:

import {BrowserRouter} from 'react-router-dom';
...
const Router = () => (
  <BrowserRouter basename={process.env.PUBLIC_URL}>
    <Route path='/home' component={Home} />
  </BrowserRouter>
)

3. The cleanup action didn't happen and now the index page is polluted! What do I do?

Since everything is inside your github pages branch, just manages directly:

• Remove the correct directory
• Remove the app from manifest.json

The next time this action runs, it will gernerate the correct index.html based on manifest.json. Probably this will be automated in next releases.

4. It's taking too long to update the index page for my new commit!

When the action just finished, it might take some time to the github pages reflect that. Even though the correct index.html was generated and is inside the updated github pages branch. I'm not sure how to burst the cache immediatly :/

Please, if you find some bugs are some usecase not covered in this README, open a issue and feel free to open a PR to fix it :) Basically, this action is just a bunch of bash commands inside a node.js githubaction wrapper, so it's hard to replicate it, unless inside the real machine running an action... :/