Building CI/CD workflow for my CV

February 9, 2022 3-minute read

In this project, I’ve built an CI/CD workflow with GitHub Actions to automatically build and deploy my CV to GitHub Pages whenever it’s updated.

Docker Image of TeXLive

First of all, my CV is written in LaTeX the fundation of the workflow is building LaTeX files. Thus an installation of TeXLive is needed as it’s the standard TeX distribution. However, a TeXLive distribution is massive and takes at least 10s of minutes to install, and there is also the issue of the outdated TeX Live distribution that is available with Ubuntu’s APT package manager.

A Docker image of an up-to-date TeXLive installation is an apparent solution to these problems. Although there is an existing texlive/texlive Docker image available on Docker Hub, a custom build is still desired for the optimal image size and more control over what is installed within the image.

Therefore, the fulvwen/texlive is created with the CI workflow setup from GitHub Action to build and push the image to Docker Hub automatically. The repository lyuwen/docker-texlive contains all the necessary information including the Dockerfile and texlive.profile that defines the installed TeX packages, along with the GitHub Action configurations. In the end, a Docker image of less than 1GB is created with most of the common components required to build LaTeX files.

Additionally, the script to install the TeXLive distribution can be find in the repository lyuwen/install-tl-ubuntu, which is forked from scottkosty/install-tl-ubuntu and modified so it be used to install the latest distribution of TeXLive.

GitHub Action to build LaTeX files

For the purpose of making life easier, a Docker container GitHub Action is built to avoid redundant setup scripts to build. With the Action lyuwen/build-latex-action, one can build a LaTeX source file into PDF with minimum setup needed:

uses: lyuwen/build-latex-action@v1
with:
  file: 'main.tex'

Initially, following the guide on creating a Docker container action, an intermediate Docker image to the accommodate entry point script is setup to be created on the fly when the GitHub Action is used. However this build step takes nontrivial amount of time and should be avoided for efficiency, thus the intermediate Docker image is now built and pushed to GitHub Package Registry ghcr.io/lyuwen/build-latex-action:latest.

CI/CD for my CV

With all necessary components prepared, now it’s time to setup the CI/CD workflow for my CV. The goal in this project is to build the CV from LaTeX source into a PDF file whenever the repository receives new pushes and make the resulting PDF file available through GitHub Pages.

My CV uses a custom made document class derived from the regular article document class. It is adapted from a XeLaTeX template zachscrivena/simple-resume-cv, with significant modifications for a much simpler and more compact design.

The workflow consists of the following parts:

Check out the repository using standard actions/checkout action.
```
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
```

Build LaTeX file with lyuwen/build-latex-action action.

- uses: lyuwen/build-latex-action@v1
  id: texbuild
  with:
    file: 'main.tex'

Run a preparation script to copy the built PDF file and create a simple HTML index page into a directory for deployment.

- name: Prepare for publish
  run: |
    mkdir public
    cp ${{ steps.texbuild.outputs.output }} public/LFu_CV.pdf
    cd public && bash ../prepare_for_publish.sh

Deploy the directory to GitHub Pages branch (gh-pages) of the repository using peaceiris/actions-gh-pages action.

- name: Deploy
  uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
  if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
  with:
    github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
    publish_dir: ./public

Finally, just to keep a record, the built PDF file is attached to the build as a build artifact.

- uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
  with:
    name: ${{ steps.texbuild.outputs.output }}
    path: ${{ steps.texbuild.outputs.output }}

Now, as the final result, the CV can be found here with a simple index page available here that shows the time in UTC when the latest CV is built. The CV project repository is available in lyuwen/lyuwen-cv.