Zero manual setup to deploy

[Haaxor1689]

I'm teaching a React course using Github Classroom and am trying to use this action alongside other steps to build and deploy student's repository to gh-pages for review. If you are not familiar with Classroom, it basically creates new repositories from a template repository for each student. This way I can also do some automations with Actions.

Is there a way to get around having to manually do these steps or any other steps like adding secrets to the repository? If possible I would like to avoid giving the students admin privileges for the repositories without which they can't access the Pages settings and I also really don't want to manually click through all their repositories to enable gh-pages.

[peaceiris]

Adding secrets to the repository?

Quote from README.md

For newbies of GitHub Actions: Note that the GITHUB_TOKEN is NOT a personal access token. A GitHub Actions runner automatically creates a GITHUB_TOKEN secret to authenticate in your workflow. So, you can start to deploy immediately without any configuration.

Don't want to manually click through all their repositories to enable GitHub Pages

Basically, a user needs to enable the GitHub Pages manually because the GitHub Pages cannot dertermine which branch is used for the production branch.

You can call the GitHub Pages REST API as an admin of the classroom.

Note that GITHUB_TOKEN has no permission for the API. That's is a reason why this action does not call it. Maybe you need to create a personal access token as an admin of the classroom to call the API.

[Haaxor1689]

Basically, a user needs to enable the GitHub Pages manually because the GitHub Pages cannot dertermine which branch is used for the production branch.

Well github should know it since the gh-pages is the default settings.

Maybe you need to create a personal access token as an admin of the classroom to call the API.

Adding my PAT to the github action running in student's repository would mean they would have access to it right and there is no way of keeping it secret.

[peaceiris]

Adding my PAT to the github action running in student's repository would mean they would have access to it right and there is no way of keeping it secret.

Please call the API from your local machine or a CI workflow on a private repository.

curl -i -u '{owner}:ghp_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' \
  -X POST -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.switcheroo-preview+json" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}/pages \
  -d '{"source":{"branch":"gh-pages","path":"/"}}'

Create the personal access token ghp_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with the repo scope.