New Publishing Workflow

This site now has a new publishing workflow. Hopefully this will reduce friction and encourage me to write more.

I have a Jekyll based builder with site contents in a private github repo. I use Obsidian to edit it, because Obsidian.

When I’m happy with a page, I push it to my private repo. I have an action set up that will then build the site with the following docker file:

FROM ruby:3.3 as builder  
WORKDIR /site  
ADD  Gemfile Gemfile.lock ./  
RUN bundle install

and then I publish it using Github Pages, using this workflow:

name: Makefile CI  
  
on:  
  push:  
    branches: [ "main" ]  
  pull_request:  
    branches: [ "main" ]  
  
jobs:  
  build:  
  
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest  
  
    steps:  
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4  
  
    - name: Build Site  
      run: make  
  
    - name: Push directory to another repository  
      uses: cpina/github-action-push-to-another-repository@v1.7.2  
      env:  
        SSH_DEPLOY_KEY: $  
      with:  
          user-email: 'dewey@deweysasser.com'  
          destination-repository-name: 'deweysasser.github.io'  
          destination-github-username: 'deweysasser'  
          source-directory: '_site'  
          target-branch: 'main'

Obviously, I have a Makefile to stitch this all together, but that only does a docker build, then a docker run with the current path mapped into the container, so it can produce the site output. I could do that in straight up ruby on GitHub Actions, but I want the same build process locally as in GHA, and this keeps it nice and consistent.

Once the generated site is committed to the public site repo, I use the default Action to publish a static site.

Potential improvements

• use the Obsidian Enveloppe plugin to allow me to use all of the rich set of Obsidian rendering in my blog.
• use the Obsidian Git Plugin to automate the commits

These two approaches are likely in conflict, so I probably won’t do both. I’ll likely go with the latter choice until I need something like Dataview (which is utterly awesome for doing things in Obsidian).

• deploy the site directly from my private repo
• make my private repo the public one

I’m currently on a free GitHub plan, so I can’t have pages associated with a private site, but…there’s really nothing private in my public site (though I should scrutinize that before committing to it), so I will quite probably at some point make the source public, and not just the site.