(Bonus) Implementing CI/CD for documentation using containers

Last updated on 2025-06-18 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

How to setup CI/CD for documentation using containers?

Objectives

Setup a CI and CD workflow for container images using GitHub Actions
Learn about the GitHub Container Image Registry

Knowing about containers and how we want to create a container image, we will dive into implementing CI/CD for our documentation using Docker.

We won’t be running these commands locally so you do not need Docker installed. We will just created the GitHub Actions YAML file to let CI/CD run it instead.

If you do have docker installed, feel free to run these commands locally. It is just not required.

Setup CI for documentation

The main job we need for CI is to build the container image for the documentation.

We can accomplish this simply with Docker via:

BASH

docker build -t my-docs .

So let us add this to our CI YAML. Luckily, Docker is already installed on the GitHub Actions runners!

If not already in the project directory, go ahead and get there. We will make our feature branch:

BASH

cd intersect-training-cicd
git checkout main
git pull
git checkout -b add-docs-cicd

We will create a new .github/workflows/docs-ci.yml file in the project.

Open .github/workflows/docs-ci.yml with your favorite editor and add the following

YAML

name: Documentation CI
on: push
jobs:
  build-docs-using-docker:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Build docs via Docker
        run: docker build -t my-docs .

NOTE: Don’t forget the . at the end of the docker build -t my-docs . command! That tells the build command which directory to use.

Let’s push this to the repository and see what happens!

BASH

git add .github/workflows/docs-ci.yml
git commit -m "Adds job to build docs in CI via docker"
git push -u origin add-docs-cicd

So we are successfully building our container image in CI!

Now, we need to publish this image via CD. This is equivalent to pushing the container image to a container image registry.

GitHub Container Image Registry

We won’t be using the DockerHub container image registry.

Instead, we will use GitHub’s built-in GitHub Container Image Regsitry (GHCR). Similar to one reason why we choose GitHub Actions for CI/CD, GitHub can integration with GHCR without requiring 3rd party credentials to be shared, like we did with TestPyPi.

Also, it is free! DockerHub is as well, mostly.

Setup CD for documentation

As before, we need the trigger setup for the publish / releases.

We can re-use what we previously had for the Python package CD trigger:

YAML

on:
    workflow_dispatch:
    release:
      types:
        - published

For the jobs, we will do a build and push of the container image on Releases.

We will heavily rely on existing Actions in GitHub to accomplish this: * docker/setup-buildx-action: Sets up Docker for us on the runner Marketplace * docker/login-action: Logs into container registries using runner credentials Marketplace * docker/build-push-action: Builds and pushes image to container registry. Marketplace

Open .github/workflows/docs-cd.yml with your favorite editor and add the following:

YAML

name: Documentation CD
on:
    workflow_dispatch:
    release:
      types:
        - published

jobs:
  publish-docs-using-docker:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      packages: write
    steps:
      -
        name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      -
        name: Set up Docker Buildx
        uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v2

      -
        name: Login to GitHub Container Registry
        uses: docker/login-action@v2
        with:
          registry: ghcr.io
          username: ${{ github.actor }}
          password: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

      -
        name: Build and push catalog image
        uses: docker/build-push-action@v4
        with:
          context: .
          push: true 
          platforms: linux/amd64,linux/arm64
          tags: ghcr.io/${{ github.repository }}:${{ github.ref_name }}

A few things to note: * The permissions:packages:write is important to allow this job to write to [GitHub Packages][github-packages], which the container registry is part of. * In docker/login-action, github.actor is a special variable GitHub provides for the runner to use as a “username”. Similar to __token__ usernames. * In docker/login-action, secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN is a secret GitHub provides for the runner to log back into other GitHub services. Reference: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-guides/automatic-token-authentication * In docker/build-push-action, the push: true is what tells this action we want to push the image to the container image registry * In docker/build-push-action, we are building for multiple hardware platforms via platforms: linux/amd64,linux/arm64. * In docker/build-push-action, the tags is essentially the tag name others will use to “pull” the image from. * We are using some other github.* variables in the tags to construct the image name in the container registry: - github.repository: Repository name (i.e. marshallmcdonnell/intersect-training-cicd) - github.ref_name: Short name of branch or tag, using it as a sort of “version number” (i.e. add-docs-cd or v0.1.0)

Let’s push this to the repository and see what happens!

BASH

git add .github/workflows/docs-cd.yml
git commit -m "Adds CD for docs to container image registry"
git push -u origin add-docs-cicd

Looks like it passed!

And if we look at the “Packages” tab in GitHub, we should see our package!

Going into the package, we can see our Users are given instructions on how to get this container via docker pull

We can launch this container, mapping from the container port 80 (HTTP) to one on our host machine (8080), to spin up our docs server!

BASH

docker run -p 8080:80 <container image tag>

Then, navigate to http://localhost:8080.

Now we can allow operations or system administrators to serve our docs using containers!

Side note about our “CD”

Action: Question about our CD

So we just setup CD for a documentation server right?

Show me the solution

Not quite. We are doing CD for the “publshing” part.

Yet, CD is continuous delivery or deployment. We really have not deployed our server. Someone else still has to do this for us right now.

True CD for a pipeline like this would include deploying this onto the server as a website

Wrap up

This wraps up CI/CD for containers.

Once you are happy, let’s use our open pull request for this branch and get it merged back into main!

Clean up local repository

To get your local repository up-to-date, you can run the following:

git checkout main
git pull
git remote prune origin # prune any branches deleted in the remote / GitHub that are still local
git branch -D add-docs-cicd # optional

Key Points

GitHub provides resources to publish container images