Following are the notes for automating the deployment of this blog on my Raspberry Pi.

After exploring different options, I considered rsync-ing over the source code after some basic minification through GitHub Actions with Hugo. This required opening up ports on my router and port-forwarding. A couple of ports were already opened up for HTTP/HTTPS (to self-host this blog) and I did not want to expose any more of them. Definitely not for rsync or ssh.

Enter self-hosted GitHub Actions. This is a really nice way to extend the power of Actions and lets you run jobs on your own machine, avoiding any throttling or wait time. You install the runner application and that listens to GitHub for jobs. When jobs are available, the source is pulled automatically and actions are run on your server, so all this needs is an internet connection. The runner also auto-updates itself to the latest version whenever a job is assigned.

There are multiple packages for different operating systems and CPU architectures, but I chose Linux/ARM64 for my Pi running Raspberry Pi OS. All you need to do is go to your-github-repo-url/settings/actions/runners/new and follow the instructions. So, for this website which is open source, it would be github.com/viseshrp/website/settings/actions/runners/new. You could also go to your repo and then: Settings -> Actions -> Runners -> New self-hosted runner.

Be aware you may not be able to install or run this application directly as the root user but will have to run sudo actions as a different user.

./run.sh will start and run the runner app immediately but if you want to run it as a daemon, you must install the systemd service and start it.

sudo ./svc.sh install
sudo ./svc.sh start

sudo is necessary here because it will create a systemd controlled service for you and run it as a daemon. This should print out the name and/or path of the service which should be something like actions.runner.user-repo.hostname.service.

Mine looked something like below, and I enabled it so that it started itself if I ever restarted my Pi.

sudo systemctl status actions.runner.viseshrp-website.rpiweb.service
sudo systemctl enable actions.runner.viseshrp-website.rpiweb.service

If you check the runners page again, it must show up as connected and idle. Now, you just have to include it with the runs-on: self-hosted directive in your Actions YAML.

My runner and this website run on the same Pi so the hack I made was to include a local rsync command that copied the code over to the blog’s installation path on the server once the build was complete.

Now, every time I push something to my repo, it will auto-trigger a build through Actions on my Pi and in the end copy the artifacts over. The website is served through a NGINX Docker container that runs on the same host and since the source is just static files, no restarts of the container or NGINX are required. Changes will immediately go live.

Update (2/2/23)

Encountered a problem when I was setting up the runner again from scratch.

Error: Input 'submodules' not supported when falling back to download using the GitHub REST API

Reinstalling apt install git solved it for me.

Update (9/26/23)

This has now been made a lot easier through a Docker image. Checkout my compose file here, add your secrets and just do: docker compose up -d.