How to Deploy Your Ghost Theme Using GitHub Actions

27 April 2020

Last week I tried the Deploy Ghost Theme GitHub action. This is an excellent tool for theme deployment and a time saver. This tool helps with theme deployment. This means that instead of uploading your theme to your Ghost blog every time you make a change. You can now deploy your theme every time you push a new update to your theme repository main branch. So, the purpose of the GitHub action is to take the theme from the GitHub repo and send it to your website.

I assume you are familiar with using Git and GitHub, and your theme is already on GitHub.

➊ Create a Custom Ghost Integration

The first step is creating a new Custom Integration in Ghost Admin → Integrations.

You can give the new integration a new name—for example, Deploy Ghost Theme.

Once created the integration, two values will be available, Admin API Key, and API URL.

➋ Create GitHub Repository Secrets

On the GitHub theme repository, navigate to Settings > Secrets > Actions.

Create two new secrets. The first is GHOST_ADMIN_API_KEY, containing the Admin API Key. The second is GHOST_ADMIN_API_URL, including the API URL.

➌ Add the Github Deployment Config File

Inside your local theme repository, create a config file called .github/workflows/deploy-theme.yml and copy the following code. Once you have added this file, commit and push your changes to the remote repository.

name: Theme Deploy
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
      - main
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: TryGhost/action-deploy-theme@v1.6.3
        with:
          api-url: ${{ secrets.GHOST_ADMIN_API_URL }}
          api-key: ${{ secrets.GHOST_ADMIN_API_KEY }}

You are now ready to test and do your first theme deployment. The theme will automatically be deployed whenever you push a new commit to the main repository branch.

On the GitHub theme repository, navigate to Settings > Actions to check the theme deployment actions list.