How to use the github action with a theme?

[Jacob-Stevens-Haas]

• I have searched the issues (including closed ones) and believe that this is not a duplicate.
• I have searched the documentation and believe that my question is not covered.

Issue

I'm trying to use the provided github action to deploy my site. Locally, I've run pelican-themes --install path/to/pelican-themes/Flex, having cloned that repo. The action sees my THEME in pelicanconfig.py and raises the error "CRITICAL Exception: Could not find the theme"

My jobs:

jobs:
  theme:
    name: install theme
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      with:
        repository: "alexandrevicenzi/Flex"
        ref: "v2.5.0"
    - name: Set up Python
      uses: actions/setup-python@v4
      with:
        python-version: "3.11"
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: "install dependencies"
      run: |
        pip install -r requirements.txt
        pelican-themes --install ./Flex
  deploy:
    needs: theme
    uses: "getpelican/pelican/.github/workflows/github_pages.yml@master"
    permissions:
      contents: "read"
      pages: "write"
      id-token: "write"
    with:
      settings: "publishconf.py"
      requirements: "-r requirements.txt"

My actions look like:

[justinmayer]

Hey Jacob. I don’t believe any Pelican maintainers have experience with this workflow, which was kindly contributed by @seanh, and thus we are ill-equipped to assist with this question.

@seanh: Any thoughts?

[seanh]

Hi @Jacob-Stevens-Haas,

Unfortunately the shared workflow doesn't support themes yet, it's something I overlooked when writing the workflow. I've been meaning to send a PR to add a theme option but haven't got round to it yet.

In the meantime you could copy-paste the workflow that I use to deploy my own site, it does the same thing as the Pelican project's worklfow but supports a theme: https://github.com/seanh/seanh.github.io/blob/main/.github/workflows/pelican.yml

@justinmayer I think what the Pelican project's workflow needs is a theme option added to the inputs section at the top for the Git URL of a theme. Then, if a theme option is given, the workflow will need to clone the theme repo to a directory and pass the appropriate --theme path to the pelican command. Any THEME setting in the user's Pelican config file should be ignored (overridden by the --theme). For the --theme path the workflow should probably pass an absolute path to the directory where it cloned the theme, using a relative path will be unreliable since users can change the location of the settings file with the settings option.

[Jacob-Stevens-Haas]

Ah, thanks! Yeah, I ended up copying the workflow and adding steps to the build job. Pretty similar to what you had done, and I agree the CI theme should override pelicanconf.py/publishconf.py.

[seanh]

I've worked on a PR to add theme support and a couple of other things to the GitHub Actions workflow: seanh#1

Seems to work for my site: https://github.com/seanh/seanh.github.io/blob/1a760df43eb3cf9b668e06c77bf29fd60c00b683/.github/workflows/pelican.yml#L16.

I'll tidy it up soon (commit history is a mess) and send it as a PR to the Pelican project

[seanh]

Finished PR to add theme support: #3330

[justinmayer]

Above-mentioned PR has been merged. Thank you, Sean!