Great GitHub actions for techdocs sites

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2024-07-06 16:30:04

There are two main options for techdocs sites. You can use a SaaS solution like Readme or DeveloperHub. Or you can use a static site generator like Jekyll, Hugo or Docusaurus. There are strengths to each approach, but for this post I want to look at continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tasks you can run on staticly generated tech documentation.

Why use CI/CD for your docs site? CI/CD tools let you automate code or documentation tasks. For documentation, you can run checks to ensure consistency and correctness which make your documentation better.

GitHub Actions is the CI/CD tool I’m going to refer to, but similar functionality is available with other CI/CD solutions such as CircleCI or Jenkins. Additionally, I’ll talk about the content living on GitHub in a repo, but you could use self hosted git, gitlab, bitbucket or other version control solutions.

This is the first one and the easiest win. You should have a workflow automatically deploys changes when a PR is merged to your primary branch. This lowers the barrier to entry to contributing to documentation, because you only need to get a GitHub PR approved. Similar to continuous deployment of a SaaS application, it makes it easy to push changes regularly.