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Hiding Sensitive Articles on Your GitHub Pages Blog

/en/posts/github-actions/ map[email:[email protected] name:Junyi Hou]
Table of Contents

# Background

How can you prevent others from seeing certain articles in your blog that is hosted by GitHub Pages?

This guide offers a strategy to host websites on GitHub Pages while keeping sensitive content private.

The solution involves using two separate GitHub repositories:

  • Private repo blog-src: Holds the source code of your website.

  • Public repo blog.github.io: For the generated static website.

This approach ensures sensitive content remains private in blog-src. Upon each commit to blog-src, an automated process builds the static site and pushes it to blog.github.io, updating your public website without exposing restricted content (See Fig.1).

The Overview of using Github Actions to publish GitHub pages
Fig.1 - Modifying blog-src automatically builds the site and synchronizes it to blog.github.io

Let’s take a look at how to achieve this.

# Step 1. Create a personal access token

Going to this page (Settings ➜ Developer Settings ➜ Personal access tokens)

Generate new token (classic)

Check all “repo” and “workflow”. (See Fig.2)

View Service
Fig.2 - Create a personal token for our GitHub Action.
View Service
Fig.3 - Example of the created token.

Copy the token, for example 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

# Step 2. Create a repository secret in blog-src

This repository contains the source code of our website and a GitHub Action.

So we need to set our personal access token (generated from Step 1) as a repository secret, to support the GitHub Action procedure.

Go to blog-src ➜ Settings ➜ Secrets and variables ➜ Actions ➜ New repository secret

View Service
Fig.4 - The entry for creating a new repository secret
View Service
Fig.5 - Create a new repository secret

# Step 3. Set up a workflow for blog-src

Repository ➜ Actions ➜ Set up a workflow yourself

Setup Actions
Fig.6 - Set up a workflow.

You need to learn how to write a workflow, here are some documents you can read:

Carefully design your workflow file, here we give you an example:

# main.yaml
# A Sample workflow for building and deploying a site to GitHub Pages
name: Deploy Website to Pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main # Triggers this workflow whenever there's a push to the `main` branch

  # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    # Runs at 00:00 UTC every day
    - cron: "0 0 * * *"

# Sets permissions of the GITHUB_TOKEN to allow deployment to GitHub Pages
permissions:
  contents: read
  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

# Default to bash
defaults:
  run:
    shell: bash

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      YOUR_ENV_HERE: 0.1.2.3
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          submodules: recursive
          fetch-depth: 0

      - name: Build my website
        run: |
          echo "Building the website ... (Remember to replace it with the real command!!!)"          

      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          personal_token: ${{ secrets.GH_PAGES_PAT }} # The pre-defined secret in Step 2.
          publish_dir: ./public  # Content in this folder will be pushed to the target repo.
          user_name: 'github-actions[bot]'
          user_email: 'github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com'
          external_repository: Junyi-99/blog.github.io  # Your GitHub Pages Repo (target repo)
          commit_message: 'Automated deployment from Repository blog-src'

# Step 4. Push to blog-src

All you need to do in this step is push some commits to blog-src, and if all goes well, your GitHub Actions will automatically execute, build your site, and push it to the blog.github.io repository.

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