GitHub Pages

Set up continuous integration and deployment of your Feaurevisor project with GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages.

See more about GitHub Actions set up in previous guide here.

Creating a new project#

This guide assumes you have created a new Featurevisor project using the CLI:

Command

$ mkdir my-featurevisor-project && cd my-featurevisor-project
$ npx @featurevisor/cli init
$ npm install

GitHub Pages#

We are going to be uploading to and serving our datafiles from GitHub Pages.

GitHub Pages is a product that allows you to host your static sites and apps on GitHub's global network. Given Featurevisor project generates static datafiles (JSON files), it is a great fit for our use case.

Workflows#

We will be covering two workflows for our set up with GitHub Actions.

Checks#

This workflow will be triggered on every push to the repository targeting any non-master or non-main branches.

This will help identify any issues with your Pull Requests early before you merge them to your main branch.

.github/workflows/checks.yml

name: Checks
on:
  push:
    branches-ignore:
      - main
      - master
jobs:
  checks:
    name: Checks
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 10
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 20
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm ci
      - name: Lint
        run: npx featurevisor lint
      - name: Test specs
        run: npx featurevisor test
      - name: Build
        run: npx featurevisor build

Publish#

This workflow is intended to be run on every push to your main (or master) branch, and is supposed to handle publishing your generated datafiles to GitHub Pages:

.github/workflows/publish.yml

name: Publish
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - master
# Sets permissions of the GITHUB_TOKEN to allow deployment to GitHub Pages
permissions:
  contents: write
  pages: write
  id-token: write
# Allow only one concurrent deployment, skipping runs queued between the run in-progress and latest queued.
# However, do NOT cancel in-progress runs as we want to allow these production deployments to complete.
concurrency:
  group: 'pages'
  cancel-in-progress: false
jobs:
  publish:
    name: Publish
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Setup Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 20
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm ci
      - name: Lint
        run: npx featurevisor lint
      - name: Test specs
        run: npx featurevisor test
      - name: Build
        run: npx featurevisor build
      - name: Create index.html
        run: echo "<html><body>It works.</body></html>" > datafiles/index.html
      - name: Setup Pages
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v4
      - name: Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
        with:
          path: 'datafiles'
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4
      - name: Git configs
        run: |
          git config user.name "${{ github.actor }}"
          git config user.email "${{ github.actor }}@users.noreply.github.com"
      - name: Push back to origin
        run: |
          git add .featurevisor/*
          git commit -m "[skip ci] Revision $(cat .featurevisor/REVISION)"
          git push

After generating new datafiles and uploading them, the workflow will also take care of pushing the Featurevisor state files back to the repository, so that future builds will be built on top of latest state.

Once uploaded, your datafiles will be accessible as: https://<username>.github.io/<repo>/<environment>/featurevisor-tag-<your-tag>.json.

You may want to take it a step further by setting up custom domains (or subdomains) for your GitHub Pages project. Otherwise, you are good to go.

Learn how to consume datafiles from URLs directly using SDKs.

Full example#

You can find a fully functional repository based on this guide here: https://github.com/meirroth/featurevisor-example-github.

Sequential builds#

In case you are worried about simultaneous builds triggered by multiple Pull Requests merged in quick succession, you can learn about mitigating any unintended issues here.