Thread by @QuinnyPig

As is my habit on plane rides, it's time to tweak something and livetweet it.

Today's exciting plan: get started with @github actions to get every commit to the master branch deployed to an S3 bucket. I will of course blame @ericabrescia for anything that fails.

I've gotten stuff like this working previously with AWS's CodeDeploy, so I do have a fallback.

The file in question is the raw Jinja2 template that renders the snarkdown (my markdown variant) for the lastweekinaws.com newsletter at build-time.

"Wait. How is that @ericabrescia's area of expertise" you may well think.

The Duckbill Group is five people, so I think that other companies are similarly sized. She works there, and they're still a scrappy startup, right? Ergo, it's all on her.

Trouble already; the github Actions documentation is scattered across 5000 pages, and this is United Wifi we're talking about.

"github workflow copy to s3" into Google points me to github.com/jakejarvis/s3-…

We're already heading for trouble. The docs give dire warnings about the AWS keys it needs (no kidding!) and links to help.github.com/en/actions/aut….

An anchor tag that no longer exists on that page.

Okay, built a user out with a highly restrictive permission set, generated keys, shoving them into GitHub's repository configuration.

"Secret name invalid" but doesn't tell me why. That's no good. Mucking around with underscores and capital letters fixes it.

Okay, I've beaten a yml file into shape in .github/workflows/deploy.yml. That'll be easy to find later.

Now I push it to my feature branch, 'master'.

Of course there's a yaml error. That's what yaml is for.

A quick rebuild later and push, it errors again. I forgot to set the S3 bucket.

...and it works. Start to finish the run takes 34s. No infrastructure to build, nothing to tinker with, and Actions is free.

This is very well done.

Note: I've done this entire exercise from an iPad midair.

@ericabrescia's work remains solid. Would endorse on LinkedIn.