#Publish using FTP

Add a simple GitHub Action to your project to automate the building and deployment of your Retype powered website to any FTP host.

Two Retype GitHub actions will be involved in the process of sync+deploy:

1. Retype Build Action
2. Retype git-ftp Action

The first, Build Action will automatically build your Retype powered website with each new change that is committed.

The second, git-ftp Action will automatically publish your newly built website to the specified FTP host using the provided credentials. In order to optimally sync only changes between builds, it needs to keep a branch (or a directory within a branch) where it would track differences between sync-up events. By default, the retype branch is used, but of course that is also configurable.

Automatically deploying to FTP requires a basic retype-action.yml configuration file to be added to your GitHub repo and some simple project configuration.

Add the following retype-action.yml file to your GitHub project within the .github/workflows/ folder.

If the .github/workflows/ folder does not exist within the root of your project, you can manually create those folders and they will be committed along with the retype-action.yml.

name: Publish Retype powered website to FTP
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  publish:
    name: Publish to FTP host

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - uses: retypeapp/action-build@latest

      - uses: retypeapp/action-git-ftp@latest
        with:
          ftp-host: ${{ secrets.FTP_SERVER_ADDRESS }}
          ftp-root: public_html
          ftp-user: ${{ secrets.FTP_USERNAME }}
          ftp-pass: ${{ secrets.FTP_PASSWORD }}
          update-branch: true

The above retype-action.yml workflow configuration instructs GitHub Actions to automatically build and deploy your website every time commits are pushed to the main branch. A copy of the built files is committed into the retype branch to maintain change history.

Usually hosting providers inform a value to fill in the ftp-root parameter. Some common values are public_html, wwwroot, domain name of the website, but it can also be the root of the FTP server itself, where the value of . or / can be used.

Navigate to the Settings > Secrets page of your GitHub repository. There, create New repository secrets for each of the following parameters:

• FTP_SERVER_ADDRESS with the URL or IP address provided by your hosting. To also pass the FTP port number just use myhost.address:21, replacing 21 with the actual port number. 21 is the default and you may omit if so.
• FTP_USERNAME will contain the login username to the FTP server
• FTP_PASSWORD being probably the most important information to be kept safe in an encrypted secret holds the actual FTP password

See more about using secrets in actions at the Encrypted Secrets GitHub Docs article.

Now, simply commit and push the .github/workflows/retype-action.yml file to GitHub.

The action will be triggered and GitHub will then perform the following processes:

• Build the website from markdown files
• Create the branch or commit the changes between builds to GitHub
• Upload the website to the FTP server

With the first workflow run, it will generate and upload every file. From the second time onwards, only changed files should be updated.