Anyone using Github actions for your deployments?

Not a direct solution to your problem, but I am using Ansible in conjunction with Github actions and it has worked great. Ansible will handle a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and it’s DSL is very close to GH actions anyway. I posted the Ansible playbook here. And here’s the example GH action.

I do something similar, but with GitLab CI.

script:
    - ssh-add <(echo "$PRODUCTION_PRIVATE_KEY")
    - VERSION_FOLDER=`date +%F_%T`
    - scp -P$PRODUCTION_SSH_PORT -r release.tar.gz $PRODUCTION_DEPLOY_USER@$PRODUCTION_HOST:/var/www/apps/myapp
    - ssh -p$PRODUCTION_SSH_PORT $PRODUCTION_DEPLOY_USER@$PRODUCTION_HOST "mkdir -p /var/www/apps/myapp/versions/$VERSION_FOLDER"
    - ssh -p$PRODUCTION_SSH_PORT $PRODUCTION_DEPLOY_USER@$PRODUCTION_HOST "sudo /bin/systemctl stop myapp.service"
    - ssh -p$PRODUCTION_SSH_PORT $PRODUCTION_DEPLOY_USER@$PRODUCTION_HOST "tar -xf /var/www/apps/myapp/release.tar.gz -C /var/www/apps/myapp/versions/$VERSION_FOLDER"
    - ssh -p$PRODUCTION_SSH_PORT $PRODUCTION_DEPLOY_USER@$PRODUCTION_HOST "ln -sfn /var/www/apps/myapp/versions/$VERSION_FOLDER /var/www/apps/myapp/current"
    - ssh -p$PRODUCTION_SSH_PORT $PRODUCTION_DEPLOY_USER@$PRODUCTION_HOST "sudo /bin/systemctl start myapp.service"
    - ssh -p$PRODUCTION_SSH_PORT $PRODUCTION_DEPLOY_USER@$PRODUCTION_HOST "ls -dt /var/www/apps/myapp/versions/* | tail -n +5 | xargs rm -rf"

I start/stop services with systemd. Took the config here, I think https://mfeckie.github.io/Phoenix-In-Production-With-Systemd/

I wonder if you could have the same issue I’m seeing where the shutdown is not fast enough before the new start tries

Are you using systemd to restart your app too?

    - name: Restart app
      systemd:
        name: my_app
        state: restarted
      become: yes

Yes. The Ansible playbook will cancel the deploy if one is in progress so I haven’t had any issues with downtime between deploys.

Haven‘t had any issues yet. I always assumed that the stop command is a synchronous call. Is it?

This video on youtube might help Deploying to a server with GitHub Actions