How the blog is built

In the last few days I abandoned my previous blog site, which was hosted on a Tencent cloud server, because of the high cost. I found that GitHub pages is a good alternative,and I have decided to write blogs in English to practice my English.

Website Tech Design

I want this blog to be neat in style,so I decided to write all css style and write raw HTML as content for flexibility.I would break HTML pages to different HTML blocks for code reuse,and use golang code to build all these code pieces to a collection of HTML pages.Build process of HTML is through GitHub actions.

Build process

all the code is in the GitHub Repository

build go code

go build ./tools/build.go

this will generate an executable file named build in the project root directory.

build html

./build

this will generate html files to /ouput directory

push to website

the two build step above is included in this step,when we push blog html files to main GitHub branch, the GitHub action is called and pushes the generated files to the gh_page branch(we use the gh_page branch for deploying webpages),we use the GitHub actions peaceiris/actions-gh-pages to automatically push html files to git branch gh_pages .

the contents of the GitHub action job definition yml:

name: GitHub Pages
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main   # only pushed to main branch,the GitHub action is invoked
  pull_request:

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04  # build environment provided by GitHub
    permissions:
      contents: write
    concurrency:
      group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}   # Don't change this
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: actions/setup-go@v3    # set up go build environment
        with:
          go-version: '1.20.2'

      - name: GoBuild
        run: go build ./tools/build.go   # build our go file
      - name: generateHtml
        run: ./build             # invoked go executable file

      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3    # provided by third party
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./output               # tell the action where output files exist