Deployment Automation with GitHub Action

 🚀 Automating Deployment with GitHub Actions: A Complete Guide💪💬

📌 Overview
     In this blog, I’ll Walk you through setting up GitHub Actions to automate deployment for a full-stack application. We’ll cover how to upload frontend, backend, and APK files to a remote server and restart services—completely hands-free after pushing code to the main branch.

🔧 1. Prerequisites Before diving in, make sure you have:

A remote Linux server (e.g., Ubuntu on AWS)
deployuser withe right set of permissions for use of commands like rm, zip, unzip, mv, cp, etc.

Nginx or Apache configured

SSH access set up using an SSH key

A GitHub repository with:

frontend build zipped

backend JAR file

admin panel build zipped

Optional: APK file for mobile apps

⚙️ 2. Directory Structure on the Server/usr/share/nginx/

├── xyz.com/

│   ├── admin/

│   ├── app/

│   └── [static frontend homepage files]

└── abcd.in/

🔐 3. GitHub Secrets Configuration In your repository, go to Settings > Secrets and Variables > Actions and add:

Name Description 

SERVER_IP Public IP of your server 

DEPLOY_USERSSH user (e.g., deployuser)

SSH_PRIVATE_KEY Your SSH private key

📄 4. GitHub Actions Workflow (.github/workflows/deploy.yml)

name: Auto Deploy xyz to Server

on:

  push:

    paths:

      - 'deploy/**'

    branches:

      - main

jobs:

  deploy:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:

    - name: Checkout Repo

      uses: actions/checkout@v4

    - name: Upload frontend zip

      uses: appleboy/scp-action@v0.1.4

      with:

        host: ${{ secrets.SERVER_IP }}

        username: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_USER }}

        key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}

        source: "deploy/xyz.zip"

        target: "/tmp/deploy/"

    - name: Upload admin panel zip

      uses: appleboy/scp-action@v0.1.4

      with:

        host: ${{ secrets.SERVER_IP }}

        username: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_USER }}

        key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}

        source: "deploy/xyzdmin.zip"

        target: "/tmp/deploy/"

    - name: Upload backend JAR

      uses: appleboy/scp-action@v0.1.4

      with:

        host: ${{ secrets.SERVER_IP }}

        username: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_USER }}

        key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}

        source: "deploy/xyz-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar"

        target: "/tmp/deploy/"

    - name: Upload APK

      uses: appleboy/scp-action@v0.1.4

      with:

        host: ${{ secrets.SERVER_IP }}

        username: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_USER }}

        key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}

        source: "app/xyz.apk"

        target: "/tmp/deploy/"

        overwrite: true

    - name: SSH Deploy to Server

      uses: appleboy/ssh-action@v1.0.0

      with:

        host: ${{ secrets.SERVER_IP }}

        username: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_USER }}

        key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}

        script: |

          set -ex

          ZIP_PATH="/tmp/deploy/xyz.zip"

          ADMIN_ZIP_PATH="/tmp/deploy/xyzadmin.zip"

          JAR_PATH="/tmp/deploy/xyz-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar"

          APK_PATH="/tmp/deploy/xyz.apk"

          BUILD_DIR="/tmp/deploy/tmpbuild"

          echo "Cleaning frontend..."

          sudo rm -rf /usr/share/nginx/xyz.com/static

          sudo rm -f /usr/share/nginx/xyz.com/*.json

          sudo rm -f /usr/share/nginx/xyz.com/*.html

          sudo rm -f /usr/share/nginx/xyz.com/*.png

          echo "Deploying frontend..."

          sudo unzip -o "$ZIP_PATH" -d "$BUILD_DIR"

          sudo cp -r "$BUILD_DIR/build/"* /usr/share/nginx/xyz.com/

          sudo rm -rf "$BUILD_DIR"

          echo "Cleaning admin panel..."

          sudo rm -rf /usr/share/nginx/xyz.com/admin/*

          echo "Deploying admin panel..."

          sudo unzip -o "$ADMIN_ZIP_PATH" -d "$BUILD_DIR"

          sudo cp -r "$BUILD_DIR/build/"* /usr/share/nginx/xyz.com/admin/

          sudo rm -rf "$BUILD_DIR"

          echo "Updating APK..."

          sudo cp "$APK_PATH" /usr/share/nginx/xyz.com/app/xyz.apk

          echo "Deploying backend..."

          sudo mv "$JAR_PATH" /backend/xyz-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

          sudo systemctl restart xyz.service

          echo "Cleaning up..."

          sudo rm -f "$ZIP_PATH" "$ADMIN_ZIP_PATH" "$JAR_PATH" "$APK_PATH"

✅ 5. How It Works Whenever you push a change to the main branch inside the deploy/ directory, GitHub will:

Upload zipped frontend, admin, APK, and JAR files to the server

Extract and move them into correct locations

Restart your backend service

Clean up the temp files

💪 6. Testing the Workflow
To test the workflow:

touch deploy/trigger.txt

git add .

git commit -m "Trigger deploy"

git pushThen check the Actions tab in GitHub for deployment logs.

✍️ Conclusion

With GitHub Actions, you can fully automate deployment and eliminate manual steps. It’s scalable, auditable, and integrates tightly with your development flow.

Now, your team can focus on building features while GitHub Actions handles deployments in the background.