Articles on: Deployments

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a popular continuous integration and delivery platform for automating your build, test, and deployment workflow. InstaWP allows you to auto-create new instances (and destroy them, optionally) when creating a new Pull Request (PR) on your GitHub repository.

In this documentation, we will explore the steps to:

Prerequisites Setup
Configure Advanced Options
Perform Github Actions

Let’s get started 🚀

Prerequisites Setup

Step 1: Create a new staging site. Sign in to your InstaWP account and click on Add Site.

Step 2: Fill out the options according to your preferences and click Next Step.

Step 3: Select plugins according to your preference and click Create Site.

Step 4: Once created, click the Magic Login button.

Here, you can add new page, post or categories to the site.

Step 5: Save the site as a private snapshot. Go to the Sites page and click on the Save Template/Snapshot icon from your site.

Step 6: Set your snapshot name, Select Snapshot option, set the snapshot type as Private and click Save. This will save the site changes and create a new snapshot.

Step 7: Go to Deployments, enter the details of the WordPress plugin/theme repository. Select Add New from the deployments page.

Step 8: Select the repository type, enter repo URL (go to your github profile and copy the URL from Code > HTTPS), branch and destination folder. Then, click Add.

If the user's Git repository is private, they must copy the SSH repository URL from Git (copy the URL from Code > SSH) and paste it into InstaWP. Then, copy the SSH Key Pair from InstaWP and paste into their Git repository deploy keys.

Go to the git repositories settings page to add new deploy key and paste the copied SSH key.

Now, go to InstaWP deployments and click Add button. This will add the private Git repository to the InstaWP.

Configure Advanced Options

Step 1: Go to Snapshots, connect the Git repository to the snapshot and paste this Yaml file into the repository. Click on the vertical ellipsis from your snapshot and click on Enable Deployment.

The new user needs to create a new file path (.github/workflows/.yml) for the Actions yml file onto their Git repository.

Step 2: Select the git repository and copy the yml file from the pop up window.

Step 3: Paste this actions yml file contents to your github workflow folder.

Step 4: Now, click Update from the Snapshot window.

Step 5: Generate and add an API token to Git repository. Go to API Token by clicking on Profile > Account. Set a name and give permission. Then, click Create.

Step 6: Copy the API token, once it is created.

Step 7: Go to your repository's setting page to add a new secret and API token.

Perform Github Actions

Step 1: Once advanced options are configured, select the repository file and make changes to it.

Step 2: Create a new branch and start a pull request. A new WordPress site will be created with the PR content.

💡 Did you know - On creating API token you can access the API via Postman, GitHub Actions. Learn about API tokens.

Updated on: 04/08/2025

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