Publish Jekyll locally generated main branch _site subdir to gh-pages branch for GitHub Pages User site?

[BillHertzing]

I'd like to use GitHub Pages to host my user Blog site. I'd like to have Jekyll build my site locally (to ./_site) on my Windows 10 PC with non-whitelisted plugins and non-whitelisted themes, and I then commit everything to the main branch. If I add a tag like releases/\d+\.\d+\.\d+ to a commit, I'd like actions-gh-pages to publish the contents of main's _site subdirectory to my GitHub repository's gh-pages branch. I've removed _site from the .gitignore, so it gets tracked and pushed to GitHub on every sync. The workflow .yml specifies a trigger that (should) only fire if the commit includes a tag that matches the Semantic Version release tag

on:
  # Triggers the workflow on push requests to the main branch if the commit includes a tag that matches the Semantic Version release tag
  push:
    # tags: [ releases/\d+\.\d+\.\d+ ]
    branches: [ main ]
  # This line allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:

Although I have not released any release tags yet, I have that tags conditional commented out, to run the action and deploy on every commit until I get the Deploy action working.

The deploy step looks like this:

- name: Deploy
      uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
      with:
        github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        publish_dir: ./_site # the action will deploy the <repository root>/_site contents to the (default) gh-pages branch, root directory

But it is not working. Is it possible to use actions-gh-pages to publish _site to gh-pages branch for a GitHub Pages user site? I've tried a publish_dir of ./_site, ./, ., and even ../_site, none of which seem to work. With ./_site, I get this error: cp: no such file or directory: /home/runner/work/Bill.Hertzing.github.io/Bill.Hertzing.github.io/_site/.*

I'm in the very early stage of building the site. It's public, at Bill.Hertzing.github.io. I'd certainly appreciate it if you could let me know what's wrong with my Deploy step. There is also the first technical post with lots of details, and at it's end you can see the step I'm stuck on

Thanks for your work on creating this action!

[peaceiris]

It looks working for me. https://github.com/BillHertzing/BillHertzing.github.io/tree/109dc69638e0246f4eece7e79c1e98b52d7cb631

cp: no such file or directory: /home/runner/work/Bill.Hertzing.github.io/Bill.Hertzing.github.io/_site/.*

We can ignore this message (copying dotfiles.) This will be hidden in the feature release.

And, GitHub Pages has the native Jekyll building feature without GitHub Actions. Why did you use GitHub Actions with Jekyll? Just curious.

[BillHertzing]

Thanks for the quick response. I re-tried it, and it is working. I must have made a user error.

I may want to eventually develop a Jekyll Plugin and I know I'll want to eventually publish my own Jekyll theme, so might as well start with an approach that will support that. Because I want to use the latest Ruby and MSYS2 components, non-approved Jekyll Plugins and a non-approved Jekyll theme, I will keep the site source code under the main branch of my repository, build/debug the site locally on my Windows PC, commit _site along with the site source code when I do commits, and use the GitHub Action to deploy .\_site to the gh_pages branch on GitHub only when a release happens.

Kudos on this great OSS GitHub Action!