Zola Deploy Action

A GitHub action to automatically build and deploy your zola site to the master branch as GitHub Pages.

Table of Contents

• Usage
• Environment Variables
• Custom Domain

Usage

In your repository Settings > Actions > General, in Workflow permissions, make sure that GITHUB_TOKEN has Read and Write permissions.

This example will build and deploy to gh-pages on push to the main branch.

name: Zola on GitHub Pages

on: 
 push:
  branches:
   - main

jobs:
  build:
    name: Publish site
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout main
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: Build and deploy
      uses: shalzz/zola-deploy-action@v0.18.0
      env:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

This example will build and deploy to gh-pages branch on a push to the main branch, and it will build only on pull requests.

name: Zola on GitHub Pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main 
  pull_request:
  
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: github.ref != 'refs/heads/main'
    steps:
      - name: Checkout main
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Build only 
        uses: shalzz/zola-deploy-action@v0.18.0
        env:
          BUILD_DIR: docs
          BUILD_ONLY: true
          BUILD_FLAGS: --drafts
          # A GitHub token is not necessary when BUILD_ONLY is true
          # GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          
  build_and_deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
    steps:
      - name: Checkout main
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Build and deploy
        uses: shalzz/zola-deploy-action@v0.18.0
        env:
          BUILD_DIR: docs
          PAGES_BRANCH: gh-pages
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Environment Variables

• PAGES_BRANCH: The git branch of your repo to which the built static files will be pushed. Default is gh-pages branch
• REPOSITORY: The target repository to push to. Default is GITHUB_REPOSITORY(current repository). Set this variable if you want to deploy to other repo.
• BUILD_DIR: The path from the root of the repo where we should run the zola build command. Default is . (current directory)
• OUT_DIR: The build output directory of zola build. Default is public
• BUILD_FLAGS: Custom build flags that you want to pass to zola while building. (Be careful supplying a different build output directory might break the action).
• BUILD_ONLY: Set to value true if you don't want to deploy after zola build.
• BUILD_THEMES: Set to false to disable fetching themes submodules. Default true.
• CHECK_LINKS: Set to true to check links with zola check.
• CHECK_FLAGS: Custom check flags that you want to pass to zola check.
• GITHUB_HOSTNAME: The Github hostname to use in your action. This is to account for Enterprise instances where the base URL differs from the default, which is github.com.

Custom Domain

If you're using a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site put the CNAME in static/CNAME so that zola puts it in the root of the public folder which is where GitHub expects it to be.

Thanks and enjoy your day!