Ghost Tips & Tricks #3 / Deploy Your Ghost Theme Using Github Actions

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Hello everyone,

This is the third issue of Ghost Tips & Tricks. I will be happy to share with you some practical Ghost tips that I find useful. Brought to you by Aspire Ghost Themes .

Recently, I tried the Deploy Ghost Theme Github action. Wow, this is a great tool for theme deployment and a time saver. This tool helps with theme deployment. This means that instead of uploading your theme to your Ghost blog every time you make a change. You can now deploy your theme every time you push a new update to your theme repository master branch.

I assume you are familiar with using Git and GitHub and your theme is already on GitHub.

1. Create a Custom Ghost Integration

The first step we need is to create a new Custom Integration in Ghost Admin » Integrations.

You can give the new integration a new name. For example, Deploy Ghost Theme.

Once created the integration, two values will be available, Admin API Key, and API URL.

Custom Ghost Integration
Custom Ghost Integration2468×902 57.2 KB

2. Create GitHub Repository Secrets

On the GitHub theme repository, navigate to Settings > Secrets.

Create two new secrets. The first one called GHOST_ADMIN_API_KEY containing the Admin API Key. The second one called GHOST_ADMIN_API_URL containing the API URL.

GitHub Repository Secrets
GitHub Repository Secrets2054×742 70.4 KB

3. Add the Github Deployment Config File

Inside your local theme repository, create a config file called .github/workflows/deploy-theme.yml and copy the following code into it. Once you added this file, commit and push your changes to the remote repository.

name: Deploy Theme
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master
      - uses: TryGhost/action-deploy-theme@v1.2.1
        with:
          api-url: ${{ secrets.GHOST_ADMIN_API_URL }}
          api-key: ${{ secrets.GHOST_ADMIN_API_KEY }}

You are now ready to test and do your first theme deployment. Every time you push a new commit to the repository master branch, the theme will be deployed automatically.

On the GitHub theme repository, navigate to Settings > Actions to check the theme deployment actions list.

GitHub Repository Deployment Actions
GitHub Repository Deployment Actions2594×1208 127 KB

You can click any action and see more details about it.

GitHub Repository Deployment Action
GitHub Repository Deployment Action2556×1790 241 KB

That’s it for today and I hope you find this useful…

Checkout previous parts of the Ghost Tips & Tricks series:

Also, I started a Ghost Websites Inspiration series share inspiring websites created with Ghost. I hope you can find it inspiring and useful too.

Stay safe!

Ahmad

5 Likes
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Hi there, that could be useful in Ghost auto-hosted? Why not using a traditional repo and git?

I’m new in Ghost and trying to get the point :slight_smile:

Thanks!

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Not sure what you mean by auto-hosted?

It is indeed using a git repo.

1 Like
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So actions only adds gists functionallity to Ghost writting interface?

With auto-hosted, I mean in our VPS.

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No. The purpose is to deploy the theme to your website. Suppose you are developing a theme on your local machine; instead of uploading the theme manually from the admin every time you make a change, you can use this method to automatically upload the theme every time you push to the main repo branch on GitHub.

It works with Ghost Pro or self-hosting.

1 Like