Overview
What do static sites and Lego trains have in common? They both need to be built before you can play with them! This talk will focus on GitHub Actions as a way to build your static sites, as an alternative (or addition) to build steps provided by services like Netlify.
GitHub Actions is a relatively new platform to “do things” when something happens on GitHub. This offers us a lot of control when someone pushes changes to a “static” site – we can perform whatever build steps we want, including reaching out to some APIs or deploying the site to multiple hosts. Jason will look at setting up a few small GitHub Actions, just to get the hang of how they work, and then he’ll build a custom pipeline for our site.
Objective
The goal of this talk is to teach folks about GitHub Actions, and how developers can use it to create a customized build pipeline without a ton of effort.
Target Audience
Developers that make changes to a “static” site – usually one created by a static site generator like Hugo or Gatsby.
Assumed Audience Knowledge
What GitHub is, what Netlify is, and knowledge of at least one static site generator (Hugo, Gatsby, Jekyll, etc)
Five Things Audience Members Will Learn
- What are GitHub Actions
- How to use them
- How to use GitHub’s commit status API
- How Netlify or Zeit’s build steps work
- How to use Actions to customize your own build steps
