Schedule Netlify Site's Deployment With Github Actions

I schedule my posts to publish at night. I don't want to manually visit my Netlify site and trigger deploy every night because I sometimes forget to do that. I read Auto trigger deploys on Netlify tutorial of Flavio Copes but he uses Zapier for automation. I don't want to use a third-party service so I use Github Actions instead. It supports to trigger workflow run at a scheduled time.

There are some ways to build and deploy a Netlify site. You can use CLI to build and deploy or send a POST request to the site's build hook. I choose to use build hook.

Generate Netlify site's build hook

• In site Setting, select Build & deploy tab from left sidebar
• Select Build hooks section in Continuous Deployment
• Select Add build hook
• Enter Build hook name. It will be displayed in the deploy message
• Select the default branch to build
• Click Save
• It will generate a unique URL

Save your build hook as encrypted secret

You don't want everyone to know your build hook and request it continually. This will waste your account's build usage. You need to save it as repo's secrets and retrieve it in the workflow's configuration

• Select repo's Settings > Secrets
• Click New secret
• Enter secret name
• Paste the build hook URL into Value
• Click Add secret

Create a workflow

In the Actions page of your repo, you set up a new workflow.

Name your file and workflow

Configure schedule event and when the workflow runs. In schedule event, you specify the cron syntax. The workflow will run your cron syntax at UTC times

┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
│ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
│ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)
│ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12 or JAN-DEC)
│ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6 or SUN-SAT)
│ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │
* * * * *

Source

When you are typing the cron syntax, you can hover the syntax and see a popup above it. It shows you when the workflow will run

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 16 * * 1-5"

My workflow will run at 16:00 UTC from Monday to Friday.

In your job's steps, run the following command

run: curl -X POST ${{ secrets.{BUILD_HOOK_SECRET_NAME} }}

It retrieves the encrypted secret of your build hook from secrets context and sends a POST request to the build hook.

Commit your workflow configuration. It will run at the time you scheduled. You can check the result of your workflow on the Actions page

After the workflow runs, visit Deploys page of your Netlify site. You can see your triggered deploy in the deploy list.