Gitea Worker published this post for me!

If you know me, you know I’m big on self-hosting things. Up until 4 years ago, I was self-hosting a Nextcloud instance on a raspberry pi 4 (until it crapped out, and moved to an old laptop).

Over the years, I was/am self hosting various other things, like a password manager, ntfy, hoppscotch (the postman clone), gitea, pihole… You get the idea!

Now, I started this blog some time ago (less than two weeks), and I’ve been experimenting on how to optimize the workflow on creating new posts.

I’m hosting the repo on a private gitea installation, and deploying through npm run deploy on my computer (which runs npm run build && node scripts/deploy.js). The flow of npm run deploy is simple:

• Re-generate the site
• Upload to the server
• ???
• Profit

However, I was thinking this could be even faster for me: Write the blog post, git push, and turn off the computer. After all, why not let gitea re-generate the site and upload it?

So, with some help from Qwen 3.6, I deployed an act_runner on docker for gitea, configured it to download node. It took some tries, but I did it.

And this is the first post I “git push origin main”, that automatically appears on my site!

How to do it?

You need to enable actions on your gitea conf/app.ini:

[actions]
ENABLED = true

Here’s the docker compose file:

services:
  gitea-runner:
    image: gitea/act_runner:latest
    container_name: gitea-runner
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      GITEA_INSTANCE_URL: "http://gitea:3000" # Replace with your actual instance url
      GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN: "gitea_registration_token" # Go to Site Administration > Actions > Runners > Create new runner and copy the registration token
      GITEA_RUNNER_NAME: "ubuntu-latest"
      GITEA_RUNNER_LABELS: "ubuntu-latest"
      CONFIG_FILE: /config.yaml
    volumes:
      - gitea_runner_data:/data
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - /opt/gitea-runner/config.yaml:/config.yaml:ro
    networks:
      - staticnet

networks:
  staticnet:
    external: true

volumes:
  gitea_runner_data:

And the config.yaml file user in the gitea-runner container:

runner:
  fetch_timeout: 5m
  fetch_interval: 2s

container:
  network: staticnet
  valid_volumes:
    - "**"
  default_run_image: "node:20-bullseye"

host:
  workdir_parent: /tmp/act

Create the workflow file:

Inside your repo, create .gitea/workflows/ folder, and create a “deploy.yml” file with the following contents:

name: Deploy
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container:
      image: node:20-bullseye
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: '20'
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm run deploy

You have to change things (like npm run deploy) to run the correct commands, commit the file, push to the repo, and you are done!

So exciting! (I know, it’s stupid to be happy about such little things)