Simple code deployment via a Github Action that uses git and rsync.

README.md

Simple Deployment 🚀

• Install nginx and rsync on the server (using Debian as an example):

apt install -y nginx rsync 

• Add the github user:

adduser --disabled-password --gecos "" --home /home/github github

• Add github user to the www-data group created by nginx:

usermod -g www-data github

• Generate a public and private SSH keys, add the public key to the /home/github/.ssh/authorized_keys file.
• Add a DEPLOY_KEY Secret in Github which contains the github user's private key.
• Set proper permissions:

chown -R github:www-data /home/github/.ssh
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html
chmod -R 770 /var/www/html

• Put the deploy.yml workflow in the .github/workflows dir at the root of the project. This Github Action is triggered on every merge to the main branch.

• Change the <HOST> placeholder in the remote_host key to the address of your server (make sure your firewall rules allow ssh access)

• The build job in the deploy.yml uses rsync to upload the contents of the src/ dir to the destination server at the specified remote_path (/var/www/html).

deploy.yml

name: CD

# Controls when the action will run. 
on:
  # Triggers the workflow on push or pull request events but only for the main branch
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ main ]

  # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:

# A workflow run is made up of one or more jobs that can run sequentially or in parallel
jobs:
  # This workflow contains a single job called "build"
  build:
    # The type of runner that the job will run on
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    # Steps represent a sequence of tasks that will be executed as part of the job
    steps:
    # Checks-out your repository under $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, so your job can access it
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    # Deploy using rsync to server
    - name: rsync deployments
      uses: burnett01/rsync-deployments@4.1
      with:
        # -v: verbose
        # -z: compress files during transfer
        # -r: copy files recursively
        # --delete: delete extraneous files from dest dirs
        switches: -vzr --delete
        path: src/
        remote_path: /var/www/html/
        remote_host: <HOST>
        remote_user: github
        remote_key: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_KEY }}