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
• Using appleboy ssh-action (this article)

appleboy/scp-action@master is being used here. Check out my article Public key authentication with OpenSSH on Linux for details on how to configure the target server to allow SSH connections.

In this example the following secrets are created at your repository > Settings > Secrets and variables > Actions.

• HOSTNAME = target server hostname or IP address
• PORT = target server SCP port (almost always 22)
• USERNAME = the username that will be used in the SCP connection to the target server
• PASSWORD = the users SSH password

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: create the /tmp/foo directory
        uses: appleboy/ssh-action@master
        with:
          host: ${{ secrets.HOST }}
          username: ${{ secrets.USERNAME }}
          password: ${{ secrets.PASSWORD}}
          port: ${{ secrets.PORT }}
          script: mkdir /tmp/foo

Or, better yet, you can used a SSH keypair. In this example the following secrets are created at your repository > Settings > Secrets and variables > Actions.

• HOSTNAME = target server hostname or IP address
• PORT = target server SCP port (almost always 22)
• USERNAME = the username that will be used in the SCP connection to the target server
• PRIVATE_KEY = the contents of the users SSH private key file on the target server, such as $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa or $HOME/.ssh/id_ed25519

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: copy foo.jpg to /tmp/foo.jpg on EC2 instance ec2-10-11-12-13.compute-1.amazonaws.com
        uses: appleboy/ssh-action@master
        with:
          host: ${{ secrets.HOST }}
          username: ${{ secrets.USERNAME }}
          key: ${{ secrets.PRIVATE_KEY }}
          port: ${{ secrets.PORT }}
          script: sudo docker restart my-container