This GitHub action will build your Hugo site, and then publish back to GitHub Pages.

• TOKEN: A GitHub access token that can push to other repos, which in this case will be your GitHub pages repo. We cannot use GITHUB_TOKEN as defined here because it is a locally scoped token to a specific repo.

• CNAME: Contents of a CNAME file.
• GITHUB_ACTOR: The name of the person or app that initiated the workflow. For example, octocat. See here.
• GO_VERSION: The version of Go you may want to install. This is not required for basic operation. Values should be in the format of 1.17.
• HUGO_ARGS: Arguments passed to hugo.
• HUGO_EXTENDED: If set to true, the extended version of Hugo will be used. Default is false.
• HUGO_PUBLISH_DIR: Specify if you do not use the Hugo default of public.
• HUGO_VERSION: This allows you to control which version of Hugo you want to use. The default is to pull the latest version.
• TARGET_BRANCH: This is the branch to push the public files e.g. docs. Default is main branch.
• TARGET_REPO: This is the repo slug for the GitHub pages site. e.g. benmatselby/benmatselby.github.io.

name: Push to GitHub Pages on push to main
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    name: Deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v1

      - name: Deploy the site
        uses: benmatselby/hugo-deploy-gh-pages@main
        env:
          HUGO_VERSION: 0.88.0
          TARGET_REPO: benmatselby/benmatselby.github.io
          TARGET_BRANCH: main
          TOKEN: ${{ secrets.TOKEN }}
          HUGO_ARGS: '-t academic'
          CNAME: benmatselby.github.io

This will:

• Clone the TARGET_REPO into the build folder.
• Commit the changes with the date as the git commit message.
• Push back to GitHub using the TARGET_BRANCH environment variable.

To test this action locally, you can run the following in your hugo site:

Build the docker image

docker build --pull --rm -f "Dockerfile" -t hugodeployghpages:latest .

Run the standard version of Hugo and the action.

# cd to your hugo site
docker run --rm \
  -eGITHUB_TOKEN \
  -eGITHUB_ACTOR \
  -eTARGET_REPO=benmatselby/benmatselby.github.io \
  -v "$(pwd)":/site/ \
  --workdir /site \
  hugodeployghpages

Run the extended version of Hugo, and the action.

# cd to your hugo site
docker run --rm \
  -eHUGO_EXTENDED=true \
  -eGITHUB_TOKEN \
  -eGITHUB_ACTOR \
  -eTARGET_REPO=benmatselby/benmatselby.github.io \
  -v "$(pwd)":/site/ \
  --workdir /site \
  hugodeployghpages

For an in depth tutorial, see this blog post. It is geared mostly at users of the Hugo Academic theme, but should be more broadly applicable.