Remove the static-websites GitHub action

[MarcoIeni]

We maintain a GitHub Action called static-websites that uploads a static website to GitHub Pages and (optionally) invalidates the cache of a CloudFront distribution. This action is used a few times in the rust-lang organization, but only rust-lang/thanks makes use of the cache invalidations.

Since GitHub now supports and encourages uploading static websites as artifacts, we want to refactor the workflows that use the static-websites action and replace it. Once that has been done, we can remove the action from this repository.

For each workflow that uses this action, we need to:

1. Replace the usage of static-websites with actions/upload-github-pages-artifact to upload the pre-built archive
2. Add a new deploy job as per the documentation for actions/deploy-github-pages-site

Repositories

The following repositories need to be updated:

• rust-lang/async-book Migrate GitHub Pages deployment away from the static-websites action async-book#231
• rust-lang/polonius
• rust-lang/rust-forge
• rust-lang/wg-async

The rust-lang/thanks repository is slightly different, since that uses a CloudFront distribution. Replacing the static-websites action in this repository will require more steps and help from an administrator.

• Add a CNAME file for thanks.rust-lang.org (see Managing a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site)
• As an admin, change the DNS record to point to GitHub Pages
• As an admin, remove the CloudFront distribution once it is no longer used
• Replace the static-websites action as per the instructions above

Resources

• Discussion in Zulip

For maintainers

• evaluate if we should close https://github.com/orgs/rust-lang/projects/24/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=24038173

[jdno]

Do we even need the action anymore or could we replace it by hosting static websites on GitHub Actions? I feel like that would give users the most flexibility and remove one more piece of "self-managed" infrastructure from our stack.

[MarcoIeni]

we are already using github pages

The only thing is that we add a CDN on top of it, which is "recommended" in case oh high usage

[jdno]

Oh, my bad. I thought this was the action that uploaded static sites to S3 and serve them from there. If we're already using GitHub Pages, I actually think there is even less of a reason to maintain this action. None of the sites that we have deployed has anywhere near the traffic to need a CDN. Might be a nice opportunity to clean up both some code and some AWS resources.

[MarcoIeni]

If there's no need for the CDN, we could remove the "invalidate" line from this action and delete the CDNs from terraform, yes 👍
The action at this point doesn't need the aws input variables.

Worth discussing this in zulip first though 👍

[jdno]

Started a discussion here: https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/242791-t-infra/topic/Remove.20static-websites.20GitHub.20Action

[MarcoIeni]

After our discussion, we agreed to delete this action and replace where it's used with official GitHub Actions

[miikka]

I'll take a stab at this (at EuroRust impl room), starting with the async-book repo