GitHub Actions in Practice: Automated Hexo Blog Deployment and Scheduled Tasks

目录

While maintaining a Hexo blog, manually running hexo clean && hexo g && hexo d is not just tedious but also prone to deployment failures caused by local environment differences (like inconsistent Node.js versions).

This article shows how to use GitHub Actions for automated deployment and how to add scheduled tasks to update the blog’s data automatically.

What is GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions is GitHub’s continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform. It lets you automate build, test and deploy workflows directly in a GitHub repository.

The core concepts include:

• Workflow: an automated process made up of one or more jobs, defined in a .yml file.
• Event: the rule that triggers a workflow, such as push (a code commit) or schedule (a timed trigger).
• Job: a group of steps that run on the same runner.
• Step: a specific operation within a job, either running a script or using a ready-made Action.

Hands-On Configuration

In the project we created the file .github/workflows/blog_automation.yml, which implements two core features:

1. Auto-deploy on commit: when code is pushed to the main branch, the blog is automatically built and deployed.
2. Scheduled data scraping: run the scraper script once an hour and automatically commit the updated data back to the repository.

1. Workflow Trigger Rules

First, define the trigger conditions:

name: Blog Automation

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - master
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 * * * *' # Run once every hour

2. The Deploy Job

This job runs only when the push event fires. It sets up a Node.js environment (version 24), installs dependencies, and runs the deploy script.

jobs:
  deploy:
    if: github.event_name == 'push'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Setup Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: '24' # Keep it aligned with the local dev environment
          cache: 'npm'       # Enable caching to speed up installation

      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: npm ci

      - name: Install Playwright Browsers
        run: npx playwright install --with-deps chromium

      - name: Run Deploy Script
        run: bash deploy.sh

Key points:

• npm ci: compared with npm install, it’s better suited to CI, installing dependencies strictly per package-lock.json.
• deploy.sh: we wrap the specific Hexo commands in a script and use npx to ensure we invoke the locally installed Hexo:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
echo "=== Cleaning the Hexo cache ==="
npx hexo clean
echo "=== Generating Hexo static files ==="
npx hexo g
echo "=== Deploying to the server ==="
npx hexo d

3. Scheduled Scraping with Auto-Commit (Scrape Job)

This job shows off GitHub Actions’ powerful write-back capability. It runs the scraper on a schedule and, if there is updated data, automatically commits and pushes back to the repository.

scrape:
  if: github.event_name == 'schedule'
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  permissions:
    contents: write # Needs write permission to commit code
  steps:
    - name: Checkout code
      uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - name: Setup Node.js
      uses: actions/setup-node@v3
      with:
        node-version: '24'
        cache: 'npm'

    # ... dependency-install steps same as above ...

    - name: Run Scraper
      run: node rq_scraper.js

    - name: Commit and Push Changes
      run: |
        git config --global user.name 'github-actions[bot]'
        git config --global user.email 'github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com'
        git add source/_data/rq_data.json
        # Commit only if there are changes
        if ! git diff --staged --quiet; then
          git commit -m "chore: update rq data [skip ci]"
          git push
          echo "Changes pushed to repository."
        else
          echo "No changes to commit."
        fi

Tips:

• permissions: contents: write: this is required, otherwise the Action cannot push changes to the repository.
• [skip ci]: adding this marker to the commit message prevents that commit from re-triggering the push event and causing a build loop.

Summary

With GitHub Actions we not only free our hands but also keep the deployment environment consistent (Node.js 24). Whether it’s a simple static-blog deployment or complex scheduled data processing, GitHub Actions offers an elegant solution.

中英对照

文章作者：阿文

文章链接： https://www.awen.me/post/976a6ae8.html

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