Pushing content from a folder to a branch without the folder?

[Andre601]

I'm in the work of creating a workflow to automatically push changes made to a folder within a specific branch to another branch, that is used to publish the content to GitHub Pages.

I have the following folder structure.

(root)
  |
  |- .github
  |    |
  |    |- workflows
  |         |
  |         |- publish.yml # The workflow
  |
  |- site # Contains the content I want to push
  |
  |- README.md # Give some into

In addition do I have the branches development (default) and master (publishing)

My goal now is, to take the content in site and push it to the master branch using git.
I currently struggle with the following issues tho:

1. I'm not an expert with git, so I don't know how I should setup everything that it will push development into master
2. I don't want master to be an exact copy of development. I want the content of site to be in the root for master, so that it is visible in GitHub Pages.

To close this off is here the current not working Workflow file:

name: Deploy Site

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    paths-ignore:
    - '.github/**' # Ignore changes towards the .github directory
    branches:
    - development # Only trigger on the development branch

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: [ubuntu-latest]
    steps:
    - name: Perform Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Deploy Files
      run: |
        git config user.name "github-actions[bot]"
        git config user.email "41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
        
        git add site # Add changes made in site to commit
        git commit -m "Update Website (${GITHUB_SHA:0:7})"
        git push master origin # Is this how it will be pushed?

I appreciate any help.

[peaceiris]

How about the following workflow?

peaceiris/actions-gh-pages: GitHub Actions for GitHub Pages 🚀 Deploy static files and publish your site easily. Static-Site-Generators-friendly.

name: Deploy Site

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    paths-ignore:
    - '.github/**' # Ignore changes towards the .github directory
    branches:
    - development # Only trigger on the development branch

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Perform Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Deploy
      uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
      with:
        github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        publish_dir: ./site
        publish_branch: master

[Andre601]

This has worked. Thank you

[Plankiton]

How can I set the folder to be send to gh-pages branch?