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OSS Deploy Blog

Introduction

This blog post explains the motivation behind deploying a blog using OSS services. The blog is built with Next.js and hosted on GitHub Pages, while the content is maintained in a GitHub repository and deployed using GitHub Actions.

However, accessing GitHub Pages can be difficult within mainland China. Deploying the blog to an OSS service makes it more accessible to a wider audience.

What is an OSS Service?

OSS (Object Storage Service) is a scalable and cost-effective distributed storage service provided by platforms like Alibaba Cloud. It supports various data types such as images, videos, and other multimedia files. In this context, we store both our blog content and assets on the OSS service.

Deploy Blog to OSS

Previously, we discussed deploying a static blog to GitHub Pages. In that workflow, we built our blog using Next.js, stored the content in a GitHub repository, and used GitHub Actions for deployment. The static files generated by Next.js are stored in the out directory.

For the OSS integration, we must upload the out directory using the ossutil tool—a command-line utility provided by Alibaba Cloud for managing OSS buckets and objects. This tool streamlines the file upload process via GitHub Actions.

deploy.yml
deploy-oss:
  needs: build
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  steps:
    - uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
      with:
        name: github-pages
        path: artifact
    - name: Extract artifact
      run: |
        mkdir -p dist
        cd artifact
        tar -xf artifact.tar -C ../dist
    - uses: manyuanrong/setup-ossutil@v3.0
      with:
        endpoint: "oss-cn-guangzhou.aliyuncs.com"
        access-key-id: ${{ secrets.OSS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
        access-key-secret: ${{ secrets.OSS_ACCESS_KEY_SECRET }}
    - run: ossutil cp -rf dist/ oss://isomo/ --meta=Cache-Control:no-cache

Miscellaneous

  • A custom domain may need to be bound to the OSS service.
  • Learn more about OSS static page configuration.
  • Cost: The OSS service is billed based on stored data and request counts. For a low-traffic blog, the cost is minimal—around 1 Yuan per month.

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed the motivation and process behind deploying a blog with OSS services. We covered the benefits of using OSS for storing blog content and assets as well as the deployment process via GitHub Actions. We hope this guide helps you understand the advantages of deploying your blog on an OSS platform.