Posts about: GitHub Actions

Prune gh-pages branches using GitHub Actions

This website is hosted on GitHub Pages, built using nix and hugo with a custom theme that I maintain. I have automated updates for the nix flake to get new versions of hugo and nixpkgs, which applies to both my theme and the website itself.

This automation generates numerous commits and deployments to the gh-pages branch, mainly due to minor version bumps of hugo and other changes to the theme. While this hasn’t been a problem for my static website, which primarily consists of text, a recent addition has created some challenges.

Outsourcing NixOS compile time to Microsoft

NixOS is a Linux-distribution that may be source-based, but it has a binary cache that covers things so you generally don’t need to compile things, things tends to be cached.

However, depending on how you configure your system, you may trigger compiles depending on what you do.

So a thing I do is that I run Emacs 29 with the native-comp patches that is wayland native with the pgtk-branch. This is by no mean the stable Emacs release at the point of writing. So to get this Emacs I use the excellent nix-community/emacs-overlay (that is maintained by my friend @adisbladis). However, this means that I will get Emacs from a development branch of Emacs, then I need to build all the Emacs packages that I use in my configuration as well for this version of Emacs.