GitHub Post-Deploy Actions

Github Actions come with a pretty neat set of features to automate your workflows. In this post, we talk about using Github Actions to run post-deploy actions.

At Railway, we've set up Github triggers for automatic deployments when you push to a selected branch, and with Github Actions, you can automate several parts of your development workflow. Recently, within our Discord and Slack, we've had a couple of users ask us how they'd go about running commands or webhooks after their app is deployed so we thought it'd be a good idea to publish a short tutorial doing just that, with Github Actions.

The Action

Since Railway makes the deployment status available to Github, we'll be using the deployment_status event to trigger our action. This event is triggered when a deployment status changes, and we'll be using the success state to trigger our action.

Make a new file in your repository called .github/workflows/post-deploy.yml and add the following -

name: Post-Deployment Actions

on:
  deployment_status:
    states: [success]

jobs:
  post-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: github.event.deployment_status.state == 'success'
    steps:
      - name: Debug - Print github.event object
        run: |
          echo "github.event context:"
          echo '${{ toJSON(github.event) }}'
          
      # Only run if this is a production environment deployment that succeeded
      - name: Run post-deploy actions
        if: github.event.deployment.environment == 'production'
        run: |
          echo "Production deployment succeeded"

If you have your repository deploying to multiple services, you can modify the if condition to check for the service you want to run the command for -

if: github.event.deployment.environment == 'production' && github.event.deployment.payload.serviceId == '<service-id>'

You can also see what github.event contains and build your own conditions from there.

Information on how to find the Service ID and Environment IDs as needed can be found here.

It's that simple! You can now customize the final run step to execute any commands or send webhooks using Curl or other methods of your choice.

Conclusion

We hope this tutorial has been helpful and that you'll find it useful for your own projects. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to us on Discord, Slack or the Help Station. Happy coding!