🚀 How I Deployed My Static Website Using GitHub Actions

Deploying a static website manually can be tedious, especially when you’re updating it frequently. That’s why I decided to automate my deployment process using GitHub Actions—a powerful CI/CD tool built right into GitHub.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how I deployed my static website automatically to an NGINX server using GitHub Actions.

🛠️ Tools I Used

• GitHub – to store my website’s source code
• GitHub Actions – to automate the deployment
• Ubuntu Server with NGINX – to host the static site
• Self-Hosted GitHub Runner – on the Ubuntu server

📁 Project Structure

My website files are stored in this directory:

_work/ci-static-simple-website/ci-static-simple-website/
│
├── index.html
└── README.md

⚙️ Setting Up the GitHub Action

I created a .github/workflows/deploy.yml file in my repo to define the deployment pipeline.

Here’s a simple version of my GitHub Actions workflow:

name: Deploy Static Website

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: self-hosted

    steps:
    - name: Checkout Code
      uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - name: Copy index.html to NGINX Web Directory
      run: |
        cp _work/ci-static-simple-website/ci-static-simple-website/index.html /var/www/html/index.html
        sudo systemctl reload nginx

After successfully testing my code.

Deploying my code to the Linux self-hosted server in process.

🔗 How It Works

1. Every time I push to the main branch, the GitHub Action is triggered.
2. The self-hosted runner on my Ubuntu server picks it up.
3. It copies the index.html file into /var/www/html/.
4. It reloads NGINX to apply changes immediately.

Successful deployed and it running fine.

My Code is running Live.

🎉 Final Result

Once the action runs, my static website is instantly live at my server’s public IP!

💡 Why This Is Awesome

• I never have to manually copy files again
• It works perfectly for personal portfolios, landing pages, or project demos
• Super fast and reliable!

Let me know in the comments if you'd like a step-by-step guide to setting up your own self-hosted runner or customizing your deployment pipeline!