How to automate a deploy in a VPS with GitHub actions via SSH

Hi everyone.
Some time ago I hired a VPS server to host my portfolio and do tests, but I had a problem. Every time I wanted to push a change to the server, I had to do it manually. The steps I followed were the following:

• Connect to VPS via SSH
• Move to project directory
• Make a git pull to have the new changes on my web
• Typical things of the framework used (Clear cache, etc...)

But with the appearance of Github actions, these steps changed.
Now we can write a script to tell GhActions 'do this deploy for me'.

This is very easy. Just we should create a yml file on project/.github/workflows/. For example /my_project/.github/workflows/ci.yml
And in this file, we can write something like this:

name: CI

on: [push]

jobs:
  deploy:
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/master'
    runs-on: [ubuntu-latest]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1
      - name: Push to server
        uses: appleboy/ssh-action@master
        with:
          host: ${{ secrets.SERVER_IP }}
          username: ${{ secrets.SERVER_USERNAME }}
          password: ${{ secrets.SERVER_PASSWORD }}
          script: cd ${{ secrets.PROJECT_PATH }} && git pull

• The on line says that this job is launched on push event.
• The jobs block defines what jobs will be executed.
  • The if line says that this job will only run in a push to the master branch.
  • The runs-on line says that this job will run on latest ubuntu distro.
  • And the steps block says what are the steps that we are going to execute.
    • uses: actions/checkout@v1. This is a GitHub Action for executing remote ssh commands.
    • Finally, in the with block we configure the parameters for the SSH connection.
      • In the Script label, we can write the commands that we want to run on our server, for example cd our-project-path/ && git pull

Note that I use the GitHub secrets to keep important information hidden.

Once we have this file in our repository, the next time we push the master branch, it will automatically be deployed to our server.

*It is always important to maintain good test coverage in our application to avoid unwanted errors*