DocFX

There are a number of options to build static sites these days.

My current blog is built using Jekyll Now which is great static site which uses Markdown.

Another tool I've used is MkDocs, this has been helpful as it allowed me to quickly contribute to MFractor

But with me working with .NET predominantly it makes sense to use the tooling MS use. This is DocFX.

For a great customised version of this see Prism Library Docs.

One thing I love about the jekyll based sites is you can use them with GitHub Pages. Just push and it auto builds.

For MkDocs this allows a command to push mkdocs gh-deploy.

I'd like the same for DocFX but this doesn't currently exist out of the box.

Time to use GitHub Actions

Researching first to see if anyone had got it working yet I found:

• 3284
• Community

From here I tried a few ideas:

Create a new file under the following folder:

.github/workflows/

• main.yml

Add the following:

Setup which branch will trigger the action to run:

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

Then we need to run a job on an OS:

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest 

Next we need to build the DocFX site, this is done locally running the following command:

docfx docfx.json

This will build the site the chosen path from the above .json file.

"dest": "_site",

Luckily this GitHub Action has already been built:

docfx-action from nikeee Niklas Mollenhauer

Just add the following step:

      - name: docfx-action
        uses: nikeee/docfx-action@v0.1.0
        with:
          args: docfx.json

If your docfx.json is in another location update the args input accordingly.

One thing to note is we can't use windows-latest as we get an error with the "docfx-action".

##[error]Container action is only supported on Linux

Now that the site is built we want to publish it to GitHub Pages:

Again there's an Action already built for this:

GitHub Actions for GitHub Pages from peaceiris Shohei Ueda

      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3.6.1
        with:
          github_token: ${ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }
          publish_dir: ./_site

Note: use double "{" and "}" around the github_token.

If you have changed your dest to another folder name update the publish_dir.

All GHA have a GITHUB_TOKEN automatically generated when they run so you can use this in your action.

See github_token for more info.

Push this yml file to your repo and push to your trigger branch, then click on the "Actions" tab and see it run.

This now means you don't have to build it locally, then push to the gh-pages branch manually to deploy it online.

---

Code

name: github pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: docfx-action
        uses: nikeee/docfx-action@v0.1.0
        with:
          args: docfx.json
      
      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3.6.1
        with:
          github_token: ${ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }
          publish_dir: ./_site

Note: use double "{" and "}" around the github_token.