Deploy Gatsby to Firebase Hosting with Github Actions

Automating deployment to Firebase Hosting, using Github actions

If you have a static web site you can deploy it instantly to Firebase hosting.

In this post, I will be focusing on automating deployment using Github actions — from commit to live.

What you need

• Github account + static web repo
• Firebase account

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1. Clone a starter project

Let's say I already have a fresh start gatsby (or create-react-app) project in GitHub

yarn build// then you will see another folder appears
// in gatsby => public
-|
 |-- public
 |-- src// in create-react-app => build
-|
 |-- build
 |-- src

2. Init firebase in your local project

// install firebase cli globally
yarn global add firebase-tools// then run this command in terminal of root project dir
firebase init

Choose hosting by pressing the space bar and keep going until you have firebase.json .firebaserc

3. Manually deploy to firebase hosting

firebase deploy --only hosting

Let’s automate the flow with Pipeline

The idea is when you commit your work to master (every time), it will trigger the pipeline that will build your stuff and deploy to firebase hosting

4. Get firebase token for CI

firebase login:ci

It will open the Google login page, choose your account.

After login successfully, go back to your terminal and you will see the token. Copy it then go to your GitHub repo

5. Add token to GitHub repo

6. Create actions in repo

Create file action.yml in actions.

Let me explain a little bit about this configuration.

• name of the workflow
• on: push: branches: — master means this pipeline will be a trigger for any change (commits) on the master branch
• jobs you can think of as tasks that this pipeline will do

One thing that is worth mentioned is the steps

steps:      
  - name: Checkout Repo    
    uses: actions/checkout@master

The very cool feature of GitHub actions is you can reuse other people’s actions by specifying uses . In this scenario, I reuse other actions like checkout@master (“@master” is the version of this action, you can change to @v1.x for ex.)

Try push some changes to the master branch, you should see the green pipeline. If not comment below and I will help you.