blogdown action failing

[orchid00]

Asking for your expertise, any idea why the blogdown action is not working?
I have edited this:
https://github.com/orchid00/actions_sandbox/blob/main/.github/workflows/deploy_blogdown.yml
based on this:
https://github.com/r-lib/actions/blob/master/examples/blogdown.yaml

Also changed the deploy step to use cecilapp v3 etc

However it is failing at blog_down::build_site https://github.com/orchid00/actions_sandbox/runs/2303087951
blogdown has recently been updated, but not sure if that is the underlying problem
https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/blob/master/NEWS.md

@maelle maybe you have some thoughts to share?

[maelle]

It seems a blogdown configuration is compulsory? Not sure how you had created the example at the time, did you use https://github.com/r-lib/actions/blob/master/examples/blogdown.yaml?

[orchid00]

this is the current version https://github.com/orchid00/actions_sandbox/blob/main/.github/workflows/deploy_blogdown.yml based on the link you shared.
I was just wondering if you (or anyone) know of another example I could follow.

[maelle]

I know of https://github.com/jimhester/jimhester.com by @jimhester

[orchid00]

Thanks @maelle
I have a question to anyone who knows the answer for maybe Jim. Can blogdow deploy to github pages? or does it only work with netlify? cuz those are the examples i've seen

[maelle]

I think you can deploy to GitHub pages, you can e.g. see https://github.com/ropensci/dev_guide/blob/de0f0c5cd0d4a586da24eb176e909b5fc84e97bb/.github/workflows/master.yml#L39-L50 (that's bookdown but the idea is the same, the whole site is in a folder called _book and git commands are run from there)

[orchid00]

the yaml for bookdown works, it is the blogdown yaml that fails

[maelle]

yes but the link is to the part where the site is deployed to GitHub pages which was your question.
blogdown has no helper à la pkgdown::deploy_to_branch() but if you build the website to a folder called e.g. public/ then you can use steps like the one from the dev guide bookdown workflow, to push the content of public/ to the gh-pages branch of a repo.

In the case of your book what's problematic is that you can't use the gh-pages branch as example since you use it to deploy your book itself. 🤔

[orchid00]

Yes.
🤔 I guess I need to sleep on this, because right now I have tried all the things I could think of.
I vaguely remember this discussion about the branch, maybe at the end that action was an alternative one if we were not building the bookdown.
Maybe I should use pkgdown::deploy_to_branch() in the action and define a new branch for it. Just thinking out loud 🤔

[murraycadzow]

This is what I have been using on different site that uses blogdown and originally used the version we made in the book. I hadn't gotten around to updating the book to reflect the changes:

on:
  push:
     branches:
       - main



name: deployblog

jobs:
  blogdown:
    name: Render-Blog
    runs-on: macOS-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1
      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v1
      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-pandoc@v1
      - name: Install rmarkdown
        run: Rscript -e 'install.packages(c("rmarkdown","blogdown"))'
      - name: install hugo
        run: Rscript -e 'blogdown::install_hugo()'

      - name: Render blog
        run: Rscript -e 'blogdown::build_site()'
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v1
        with:
          name: public
          path: public/

# Need to first create an empty gh-pages branch
# see https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/reference/deploy_site_github.html
# and also add secrets for a GH_PAT and EMAIL to the repository
# gh-action from Cecilapp/GitHub-Pages-deploy
  checkout-and-deploy:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   needs: blogdown
   steps:
     - name: Checkout
       uses: actions/checkout@master
     - name: Download artifact
       uses: actions/download-artifact@v1.0.0
       with:
         # Artifact name
         name: public # optional
         # Destination path
         path: public # optional
     - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
       uses: Cecilapp/GitHub-Pages-deploy@v3
       env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_PAT }} # https://github.com/settings/tokens
       with:
          email: ${{ secrets.EMAIL }}
          build_dir: public/                     # "_site/" by default

[orchid00]

hi @murraycadzow thanks for the example.

I have a question. If the bookdown action is publishing the bookdown through gh-pages
Would there be an error if blogdown also tries to deploy via gh-pages?
Could you have a look at these two deploy...yml actions? https://github.com/orchid00/actions_sandbox/tree/main/.github/workflows and explain me if they overwrite themselves?

[murraycadzow]

Hi @orchid00, you won't be able to test the action on this repo as it stands because of the differences in how bookdown and blogdown operate. To test it (at least how I did it when writing that section of the book) was to create the new blogdown site in a new repo following the instructions in the book with the difference of using the action above, rather than the one currently written.

[orchid00]

hi @murraycadzow thanks, makes things clearer.
So last week and these are very busy for me, but it is a relief to understand why it was failing. I will a reminder to look at this on the 27th of april