GitHub Actions is the CI/CD platform our customers use the most for building and deploying their code. In the past, we’ve provided a supported action, called app_action, that could be used to update an App that already exists via a GitHub Action.
Today, we’re excited to introduce completely overhauled GitHub Actions for App Platform with improved pluggability to cater to all of the deployment needs you might think of.
GitHub for all the things
The new deploy action is the heart of our GitHub Actions ecosystem. Like the old one, it allows you to update an app that already exists. However, it also does much more than that: It also allows you to completely make the respective GitHub repository the source of truth in a GitOps-style fashion. Now, you can commit an AppSpec to your GitHub repository and handle the entire deployment process via GitHub Actions. It is no longer necessary to interact with DigitalOcean directly at all (apart from generating the token for the action to use).
The in-repository AppSpec can also contain environment variable placeholders that will be replaced before deploying the new spec. This can be used to update image references on the fly or to manage your secrets via Github’s secret mechanism.
We’ve also used the opportunity to provide more integration into the GitHub Actions ecosystem. The deploy action outputs the resulting app metadata and the build and deployment logs from the deployment that took place. Optionally, those logs are also logged in the action’s output itself. That metadata can be used to create rich integrations with App Platform, tailored to your specific needs.
name: Update App
on:
push:
branches: [main]
permissions:
contents: read
jobs:
deploy-app:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout repository
uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Deploy the app
uses: digitalocean/app_action/deploy@v2
with:
token: ${{ secrets.DIGITALOCEAN_ACCESS_TOKEN }}