You may want to rather use an Action covered in the other pages, as then you don’t have to write and maintain the code yourself and the Action is easier to reuse across projects.

But these steps are useful to understand what that an action is doing. Maybe you want to use some of this flow or write your own action.

Sample

Note this leaves out the step to actually build the site and just focuses on committing.

  • main.yaml 
      steps:
    - name: Clone target branch
      run: |
        REMOTE_BRANCH="${REMOTE_BRANCH:-gh-pages}"
        REMOTE_REPO="https://${GITHUB_ACTOR}:${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}@github.com/${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}.git"
        echo "Publishing to ${GITHUB_REPOSITORY} on branch ${REMOTE_BRANCH}"
        rm -rf _site/
        git clone --depth=1 --branch="${REMOTE_BRANCH}" --single-branch --no-checkout \
          "${REMOTE_REPO}" docs/_site/

    - name: Build site
      run: # ...

    - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
      run: |
        SOURCE_COMMIT="$(git log -1 --pretty="%an: %B" "$GITHUB_SHA")"
        pushd _site &>/dev/null
        : > .nojekyll
        git add --all
        git -c user.name="${GITHUB_ACTOR}" -c user.email="${GITHUB_ACTOR}@users.noreply.github.com" \
          commit --quiet \
          --message "Deploy docs from ${GITHUB_SHA}" \
          --message "$SOURCE_COMMIT"
        git push
        popd &>/dev/null