blog post

content/blog/setting up continuous deployment for my site.md

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+---
+title: Setting up continuous deployment for my site
+author: Santiago Forero
+date: 2021-10-14T19:03:02Z
+---
+
+Hello, in today's post I will show you how I managed to set up [continuous deployment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_deployment) to my site.
+
+Before I explain anything, I want to tell you how was my workflow when I changed anything in my site:
+1. Make local changes
+2. Commit and push to the remote git repo
+3. SSH into my server
+4. Pull from the remote repo
+5. Execute the build command
+
+Doing this manually doesn't really take much time, however, it's fancier to do this automatically.
+
+In the beginning, I was thinking about setting up a [GitHub Action](https://github.com/features/actions) that basically accessed my server via SSH and executed the build commands, this isn't a really safe approach because I'm giving direct access to my machine even with an unprivileged user, I spent some time researching and asking in the **##github** IRC channel in Libera, someone suggested me to use webhooks, which mean that GitHub would make a post request to a specified endpoint, I decided that this was my best option so I started [searching](https://github.com/search?q=github+webhook+receiver) for services I could host in my machine, I found several options and I couldn't decide which one, so I made my own! A really simple node script that created an [express](http://expressjs.com/) web server that listened for post requests in some (very) secret endpoints and executed a small deploy script automatically when reached. This worked amazingly well in the first attempt. Now if I want to make changes to my computer I don't even need my computer! I can use GitHub's web editor to do anything and the changes are live almost instantly.
+
+Thank you for reading my post, let me know what you think and if you have ever done something like this.