Nicolas Grymonprez

Slight-side-step

Since 2011, I have the domain name grymonprez.com. My previous blog which hadn't been updated since 2016 was using it. I decided to check what it would take to re-use nicolas.grymonprez.com.

This can be achieved in a few way, you can point you domain, subdomain to the GitHub Page and update the GitHub Page custom domain settings. This really handy post allowed me to do that: Redirect custom domain to github pages. However this was coming with a con that would not allow me to use another domain for another project. I am not sure if i would need it for any future projects but that's not something I wanted to trade of. Since my domain name comes with a hosting space, ftp and database I decided to use that.

My hosting provider is OVH and I quickly found OVH deploy hosting action. However, after looking into entrypoint.sh I understood that it was not doing what I wanted. It's not actually deploying the static website. I could have looked at creating and action and updating it but I looked for a FTP action instead. I will keep this as an simple example on how an action template can work.

Custom FTP action to upload the generatic static website to a remote server was easy to set up. I am still trying to figure out an issue with ftps. Since my hosting was set up against my WordPress website, I had to configure the URL to point to a different directory within the www directory. I used Multisites configuration wiki page to achieve it.

Once set up I had CSS issues. The CSS wasn't loading as the HTML was looking for the code withing my GitHub repo name. Since I was initially deploying the website to GitHub pages I had to update the assetPrefix and basePath when the build process was ran by a GitHub action.

const isGithubActions = process.env.GITHUB_ACTIONS || false

if (isGithubActions) {
  // trim off `<owner>/`
  const repo = process.env.GITHUB_REPOSITORY.replace(/.*?\//, '')

  assetPrefix = `/${repo}/`
  basePath = `/${repo}`
}

Removing the variable and if statement would solve the issue. However I wanted to keep the GitHub Page, maybe as a disaster recovery option 😅.

Here is my updated code with a new variable and an updated logical condition.

const isFTPVersion = const isFTPVersion = process.env.ftpVersion || false

if (isGithubActions && !isFTPVersion) {

process.env.ftpVersion has to be added a ftp-blog.yml and since I wanted to keep deploying to GitHub pages, I created another Build and Deploy workflow to FTP the newly build website that isn't definying assetPrefix and basePath.

A push to the main branch starts build-and-deploy-blog.yml, which then use workflow ftp-blog.yml. The hiccup I encountered was related to the unavailability of the repository secrets. This was fixed after reading the following help page: reusing workflows. The secret either have to be inherited or passed to the reused workflow, I have decided to explicitly pass it.

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