Publishing Static Sites from GitHub via SFTP

If you maintain your static website in a repository on GitHub, you can use GitHub Actions to build and publish it to any web server.

The following sections show how this is done for website built with hugo. The same ideas apply to other static website generators, e.g. for jekyll. Just replace the name public in the examples below with the folder containing your built website.

Configure Synchronization Folder

Let’s start with the most important aspect:

The GitHub action SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@3.1.1 will upload only files, which are included in the git repository. Files and directories excluded by a .gitignore file will not be uploaded. This is usually the case for the generated website.

Luckily we can instruct the SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@3.1.1 to include these files in the SFTP synchronization process.

For this purpose, you need to create the file .git-ftp-include with this content in your repository root directory:

!public/

Using an additional .git-ftp-ignore file, you can control whether sensitive files should still be excluded from synchronization, e.g.:

.htaccess
.htpasswd

SFTP Upload Action

The following YAML builds a hugo website and publishes the produced public folder to your SFTP server.

First, configure the repository secrets SFTP_USERNAME and SFTP_PASSWORD for the SFTP upload service in your GitHub repository settings.

Next, copy this snippet into into your .github/workflows/hugo.yml file:

name: Hugo Site CI
on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  build_and_deploy:
    name: Build and Deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Git Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        submodules: recursive

    - name: Setup Hugo
      uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
      with:
          hugo-version: 'latest'

    - name: Clean Public Directory
      run: rm -rf public

    - name: Build
      run: hugo

    - name: SFTP Deploy
      uses: SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@3.1.1
      with:
        ftp-server: sftp://www434.your-server.de
        ftp-username: $
        ftp-password: $
        local-dir: public/
        known-hosts: www434.your-server.de ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQC/mt6O5MmBSHlX7VztOWDNWSb8sc5+rtpMHbcb16jERjz9BFfGa9UDlo1YJyJ2nCOqJqVRyxXkJ1n6yxx+UbPOGKjui/E64g6DLCcj9/Kci7G5HjspuXE/4YnB1ffZEDPZbZ3D09fpi72dyfjuuivXjLlNKRkNN6vjnWWi6mqp8F0a+tJn/FFvTFisIVKgMj7HGOQAVeX6Rn1B9hve2zvFSniWNwj95TnFQEQBxDwsbmmXckjm8BDwiguPO4/yhJOGO9W2SpFe96hOTDvOJ7Pm7WELMJorELPFxf5Msa4I06iREU+NMXaa30UhvcJWh5aVRxv6mQFRexfECxianJQj