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Zola deploy action

Github action for building a Zola site and deploying to Github Pages

From shalzz·Updated June 15, 2026·View on GitHub·

A GitHub action to automatically build and deploy your [zola] site to the master branch as GitHub Pages. The project is written primarily in HTML, distributed under the MIT License license, first published in 2019. Key topics include: actions, github, github-actions, zola.

Latest release: v0.22.1
January 29, 2026View Changelog →

Zola Deploy Action

Build Status
GitHub release (latest SemVer)

A GitHub action to automatically build and deploy your zola site to the master
branch as GitHub Pages.

Table of Contents

Usage

In your repository Settings > Actions > General, in Workflow permissions, make sure that GITHUB_TOKEN has Read and Write permissions.

This example will build and deploy to gh-pages on push to the main branch.

yml
name: Zola on GitHub Pages on: push: branches: - main jobs: build: name: Publish site runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - name: Checkout main uses: actions/checkout@v4 - name: Build and deploy uses: shalzz/zola-deploy-action@v0.22.1 env: GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

The action's version tags follow the version of Zola that should be used to build.
To use Zola v0.21.0 for instance, specify shalzz/zola-deploy-action@v0.21.0.

This example will build and deploy to gh-pages branch on a push to the main branch,
and it will build only on pull requests.

yml
name: Zola on GitHub Pages on: push: branches: - main pull_request: jobs: build: runs-on: ubuntu-latest if: github.ref != 'refs/heads/main' steps: - name: Checkout main uses: actions/checkout@v4 - name: Build only uses: shalzz/zola-deploy-action@v0.22.1 env: BUILD_DIR: docs BUILD_ONLY: true BUILD_FLAGS: --drafts # A GitHub token is not necessary when BUILD_ONLY is true # GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} build_and_deploy: runs-on: ubuntu-latest if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' steps: - name: Checkout main uses: actions/checkout@v4 - name: Build and deploy uses: shalzz/zola-deploy-action@v0.22.1 env: BUILD_DIR: docs PAGES_BRANCH: gh-pages GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Environment Variables

  • PAGES_BRANCH: The git branch of your repo to which the built static files will be pushed. Default is gh-pages branch
  • REPOSITORY: The target repository to push to. Default is GITHUB_REPOSITORY(current repository). Set this variable if you want to deploy to other repo.
  • BUILD_DIR: The path from the root of the repo where we should run the zola build command. Default is . (current directory)
  • OUT_DIR: The build output directory of zola build. Default is public
  • BUILD_FLAGS: Custom build flags that you want to pass to zola while building. (Be careful supplying a different build output directory might break the action).
  • BUILD_ONLY: Set to value true if you don't want to deploy after zola build.
  • BUILD_THEMES: Set to false to disable fetching themes submodules. Default true.
  • CHECK_LINKS: Set to true to check links with zola check.
  • CHECK_FLAGS: Custom check flags that you want to pass to zola check.
  • GITHUB_HOSTNAME: The Github hostname to use in your action. This is to account for Enterprise instances where the base URL differs from the default, which is github.com.

Custom Domain

If you're using a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site put the CNAME
in static/CNAME so that zola puts it in the root of the public folder
which is where GitHub expects it to be.

Thanks and enjoy your day!

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Contributors

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This article is auto-generated from shalzz/zola-deploy-action via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/24/2026