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.

Let's say you have a repository named my-repo that contains 2 files, foo.jpg and bar.jpg, perhaps like this.

• https://github.com/JohnDoe/my-repo/blob/main/images/foo.jpg
• https://github.com/JohnDoe/my-repo/blob/main/images/bar.jpg

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

You can SCP files using:

• The plain ole run command (this article)
• appleboy SCP action

The plain ole run command can be used to SCP one or more files in one of your GitHub repositories to one or more target servers.

name: GitHub Action
run-name: ${{ github.workflow }} run by ${{ github.actor }}
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  github-action-job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:      
      - name: Checking out the repository code . . .
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      
      - name: copy foo.jpg to /tmp
        run: scp foo.jpg ec2-user@ec2-10-11-12-13.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/tmp