WordPress.org Plugin Deploy

Deploy your plugin to the WordPress.org repository using GitHub Actions.

This Action commits the contents of your Git tag to the WordPress.org plugin repository using the same tag name. It can exclude files as defined in either .distignore or .gitattributes, and moves anything from a .wordpress-org subdirectory to the top-level assets directory in Subversion (plugin banners, icons, and screenshots).

☞ For updating the readme and items in the assets directory between releases, please see our WordPress.org Plugin Readme/Assets Update Action

☞ Check out our collection of WordPress-focused GitHub Actions

Configuration

Required secrets

• SVN_USERNAME
• SVN_PASSWORD

Secrets are set in your repository settings. They cannot be viewed once stored.

Optional environment variables

• SLUG - Defaults to the repository name. This is customizable in case your WordPress repository has a different slug or is capitalized differently.
• VERSION - Defaults to the tag name. We do not recommend setting this except for testing purposes.
• ASSETS_DIR - Defaults to .wordpress-org. This is customizable for other locations of WordPress.org plugin repository-specific assets that belong in the top-level assets directory (the one on the same level as trunk).
• BUILD_DIR - Defaults to false. Set this flag to the directory where you build your plugins files into, then the action will copy and deploy files from that directory. Both absolute and relative paths are supported. The relative path if provided will be concatenated with the repository root directory. All files and folders in the build directory will be deployed, .distignore or .gitattributes will be ignored.

Inputs

• generate-zip - Defaults to false. Generate a ZIP file from the SVN trunk directory. Outputs a zip-path variable for use in further workflow steps.
• dry-run - Defaults to false. Set this to true if you want to skip the final Subversion commit step (e.g., to debug prior to a non-dry-run commit).

Outputs

• zip-path - The path to the ZIP file generated if generate-zip is set to true. Fully qualified including the filename, intended for use in further workflow steps such as uploading release assets.

Excluding files from deployment

If there are files or directories to be excluded from deployment, such as tests or editor config files, they can be specified in either a .distignore file or a .gitattributes file using the export-ignore directive. If a .distignore file is present, it will be used; if not, the Action will look for a .gitattributes file and barring that, will write a basic temporary .gitattributes into place before proceeding so that no Git/GitHub-specific files are included.

.distignore is useful particularly when there are built files that are in .gitignore, and is a file that is used in WP-CLI. For modern plugin setups with a build step and no built files committed to the repository, this is the way forward. .gitattributes is useful for plugins that don't run a build step as a part of the Actions workflow and also allows for GitHub's generated ZIP files to contain the same contents as what is committed to WordPress.org. If you would like to attach a ZIP file with the proper contents that decompresses to a folder name without version number as WordPress generally expects, you can add steps to your workflow that generate the ZIP and attach it to the GitHub release (concrete examples to come).

Sample baseline files

.distignore

Notes: .distignore is for files to be ignored only; it does not currently allow negation like .gitignore. This comes from its current expected syntax in WP-CLI's wp dist-archive command. It is possible that this Action will allow for includes via something like a .distinclude file in the future, or that WP-CLI itself makes a change that this Action will reflect for consistency. It also will need to contain more than .gitattributes because that method also respects .gitignore.

/.wordpress-org
/.git
/.github
/node_modules

.distignore
.gitignore

.gitattributes

# Directories
/.wordpress-org export-ignore
/.github export-ignore

# Files
/.gitattributes export-ignore
/.gitignore export-ignore

Example Workflow Files

To get started, you will want to copy the contents of one of these examples into .github/workflows/deploy.yml and push that to your repository. You are welcome to name the file something else, but it must be in that directory. The usage of ubuntu-latest is recommended for compatibility with required dependencies in this Action.

Current set of example workflow files:

• Deploy on publishing a new release and attach a ZIP file to the release
• Deploy on pushing a new tag
• Deploy on pushing a new tag and create release with attached ZIP

Contributing

Want to help? Check out our contributing guidelines to get started.

License

Our GitHub Actions are available for use and remix under the MIT license.

Support Level

Active: 10up is actively working on this, and we expect to continue work for the foreseeable future including keeping tested up to the most recent version of WordPress. Bug reports, feature requests, questions, and pull requests are welcome.

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