While choosing to use this action as part of your approach to deploying to GitHub Pages is technically optional, we highly recommend it since it takes care of producing (mostly) valid artifacts.

However, if you do not choose to use this action but still want to deploy to Pages using an Actions workflow, then you must upload an Actions artifact that meets the following criteria:

Be named github-pages
Be a single gzip archive containing a single tar file

The tar file must:

be under 10GB in size (we recommend under 1 GB!)
- ⚠️ The GitHub Pages officially supported maximum size limit is 1GB, so the subsequent deployment of larger tarballs are not guaranteed to succeed — often because they are more prone to exceeding the maximum deployment timeout of 10 minutes.
- ⛔ However, there is also an unofficial absolute maximum size limit of 10GB, which Pages will not even attempt to deploy.
not contain any symbolic or hard links
contain only files and directories that all meet the expected minimum file permissions

File permissions

When using this action, ensure that your files have appropriate file permissions. At a minimum, GitHub Pages expects:

files to have read permission for the current user and the "Others" user role (e.g. 0744, 0644, 0444)
directories to have read and execute permissions for the current user and the "Others" user role (e.g. 0755, 0555)

Failure to supply adequate permissions will result in a deployment_perms_error when attempting to deploy your artifacts to GitHub Pages.

Example permissions fix for Linux

steps:
# ...
  - name: Fix permissions
    run: |
      chmod -c -R +rX "_site/" | while read line; do
        echo "::warning title=Invalid file permissions automatically fixed::$line"
      done
  - name: Upload Pages artifact
    uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v2
# ...

Example permissions fix for Mac

steps:
# ...
  - name: Fix permissions
    run: |
      chmod -v -R +rX "_site/" | while read line; do
        echo "::warning title=Invalid file permissions automatically fixed::$line"
      done
  - name: Upload Pages artifact
    uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v2
# ...

Release instructions

In order to release a new version of this Action:

Locate the semantic version of the upcoming release (a draft is maintained by the draft-release workflow).
Publish the draft release from the main branch with semantic version as the tag name, with the checkbox to publish to the GitHub Marketplace checked. ☑️
After publishing the release, the release workflow will automatically run to create/update the corresponding the major version tag such as v0.

⚠️ Environment approval is required. Check the Release workflow run list.

License

The scripts and documentation in this project are released under the MIT License.