GitHub Actions can be used to do something whenever something happens in one of your GitHub repositories. If you are not familiar with GitHub Actions, check out my article Getting Started with GitHub Actions.

Following are ways to run a command on a target server.

• Using the built-in run command (this article)
• Using appleboy ssh-action

Check out my article Public key authentication with OpenSSH on Linux for details on how to configure the target server to allow SSH connections.

The built-in run command can be used to run a command on a target server. In this example, the mkdir /tmp/foo command will be run on the target server to create the /tmp/foo directory on the target server.

name: GitHub Action
run-name: ${{ github.workflow }} run by ${{ github.actor }}
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  restart-docker-container:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:      
      - name: Checking out the repository code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      
      - name: setup SSH key
        run: |
          install -m 600 -D /dev/null ~/.ssh/id_rsa
          echo "${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}" > ~/.ssh/id_rsa        
        
      - name: SSH command
        run: ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no john.doe@server1.example.com "mkdir /tmp/foo"