Deployment automation using official Arc XP Deployer GitHub Action

Deployment automation simplifies and accelerates the ship changes in your PageBuilder bundle, from development through testing to Production environments. It reduces manual effort and risk of error, ensuring consistent, efficient delivery.

Deployment automation streamlines the software release process, offering significant benefits to businesses and development teams. Specifically, deployment automation provides:

• More frequent releases - Automated deployments, even on non-Production environments, increase the overall lifecycle of a change from start to Production. We have seen users who automate their PageBuilder deployments using Deployer API on their CI/CD tools deploy twice as more frequently than users who don’t use automation on deployments.
• Increased efficiency and productivity - If performed manually, deploying can be a time-consuming step for your engineers because they must push changes to an Arc XP environment, whether they push a few times a day or once a week or once a month. By automating this repetitive step, developers are freed from manual processes, enabling them to focus on the development cycle.
• Rapid QA feedback - Deployment automation facilitates quicker implementation of changes and reduces the QA lifecycle. Developers can continuously deliver features and bug fixes to the QA team for smaller, more manageable and quicker QA rounds.
• Scalability and adaptability - Automated deployment is not only consistent but also easily configurable, making it simpler to deploy software in new environments or adapt to different requirements with minimal effort. As your team grows, onboarding a new engineer becomes easier, as deployments are centralized and they can get started faster.
• Collaboration and visibility - Automated pipelines enhance transparency across teams, fostering better collaboration and communication, which is an important factor for agile development practices.
• Cost-effectiveness - By streamlining processes and reducing the need for manual intervention, automated deployment can lead to cost savings over time.

PageBuilder deployment automation with Arc XP GitHub Action

PageBuilder’s Deployer tool has a REST API you can use in your own CI/CD tools with custom scripts. We previously shared a DIY script in Do-It-Yourself CI/CD Deployment Script (for PageBuilder Engine Bundle) that you can implement in almost all CI/CD tools.

The Arc XP GitHub Deployment Action helps you automate your deployments using GitHub Actions, making this step easier for you if you use GitHub as your version control system and can utilize GitHub Actions to configure PageBuilder deployment automation.

After configuring Arc XP’s GitHub Action in a workflow, when you create or merge pull requests or when performing a simple push to a GitHub repository, a GitHub Action workflow triggers using Arc XP’s deploy action. The bundle zipping, upload, deployment, and promotion steps take place with a simple configuration.

When the deployment workflow finishes, the bundle is live and visible in PageBuilder Deployer:

Arc XP Deployment Action

Usage of the action (under steps in your workflow file):

- name: Perform the deploy
  if: ${{ success() }}
  uses: arcxp/deploy-action@v1
  with:
    org-id: your-org-here
    api-key: "${{ secrets.YOUR_DEPLOYER_TOKEN_HERE }}"
    api-hostname: api.sandbox.your-org-here.arcpublishing.com
    bundle-prefix: action-demo-1

This action step uploads your bundle, deploys it, waits for deployment to be completed, and then promotes it to be a live bundle.

Create your bundle zip package first

A pre-requisite for this GitHub action is to zip your bundle package as .zip file. You must zip your package prior to running this deployment step. By default, the action looks at the dist/fusion-bundle.zip location, but you can configure this with the artifact property in the action with a custom name. Ensure your zip commands produce the file in the same path this action looks for.

Depending on your previous continuous integration steps, you may already be running the fusion zip command to generate the bundle package. If you are using the fusion zip command, you may need to provide the name (and path) the deployment action needs with the -n parameter. An example command is, npx fusion zip -n mybundle.

Alternatively, you can manually run the zip command to create package of your bundle. The fusion zip command requires the full Docker stack to be running, and that may not be available or feasible on your GitHub actions runner, or you may not need the verifications. In that case, you can run the following zip command to create your bundle zip package for upload:

zip mybundle.zip -r . -x .git/\* node_modules/\* coverage/\* .github/\* .fusion/\* mocks/\* dist/\* data/\* README.md .env .npmrc

You can also simply put this command in an npm script alias in your package.json, and run that alias in your workflow. Your package.json could be:

{
  ...
  "scripts": {
    ...
    "zip": "mkdir dist; zip mybundle.zip -r . -x .git/\\* node_modules/\\* coverage/\\* .github/\\* .fusion/\\* mocks/\\* dist/\\* data/\\* README.md .env .npmrc"
    ...
  },
  ...
}

Then run the npm run zip command in your workflow.

Demo repository

We demonstrated both the manual Shell script-based workflow and a workflow that uses the Arc XP-provided GitHub Action here: Arc XP Demo 1

See a workflow example that uses the new GitHub Action: New Action Deploy

To demonstrate the manual steps you can implement without Arc XP Deploy GitHub Action, we included an example workflow that relies on Shell commands: Sandbox Deploy