A memo: Using GitHub actions to deploy a project to your VPS

Today, I created another workflow file to deploy my side project to the production environment. Here's a simple memo for what I have done.

  1. Setup a new domain name on <cloudflare.com>

  2. Setup a GitHub runner on the target VPS (this step is not really necessary, I can use an existing runner, but then I'll need to cope with coping built result to the target VPS )

    1. Setup the runner as a service, in the runner folder, run
      1. sudo ./svc.sh install
      2. sudo ./svc.sh start

  3. Create a work-flow file in the .github/workflow folder, and set

      on:
    workflow_dispatch
  4. Manually run the work flow and deploy the project to the target place
  5. Setup that project as a systemd service so we can easily restart it in the workflow file

For your reference, here the whole workflow file, and as I mentioned before, this article helped me a lot.

name: Deploy to the production env

# Controls when the workflow will run
on:
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  deploy:
    # Our previously created self-hosted runner
    runs-on: [self-hosted, linux, racknerd]

    strategy:
      matrix:
        dotnet: ["8.0.x"]

    # A sequence of tasks that will execute as part of the job
    steps:
      # Checks out repository so our job can access it
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Setup .NET Core SDK ${{ matrix.dotnet-version }}
        uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v4
        with:
          ref: ${{ github.event.inputs.tag }}
          dotnet-version: ${{ matrix.dotnet-version }}

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: dotnet restore

      - name: Build
        run: dotnet build --configuration Release --no-restore

      - name: Publish
        run: dotnet publish -c Release --property:PublishDir=/a-target-folder/HappyNotes.Api

      - name: Replace credentials
        run: |
          pwd
          sed -i "s/password-placeholder/${{ secrets.PRODUCTION_MYSQL_PASSWORD }}/g" /a-target-folder/HappyNotes.Api/appsettings.json
          sed -i "s/symmetric-security-key-placeholder/${{ secrets.PRODUCTION_SYMMETRIC_SECURITY_KEY }}/g" /a-target-folder/HappyNotes.Api/appsettings.json
          sed -i "s/staging-happynotes-api.dev/happynotes-api/g" /a-target-folder/HappyNotes.Api/appsettings.json

      - name: Restart the app
        run: |
          echo $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
          export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u)
          systemctl --user restart HappyNotes.Api.service