[node.js] How to publish a website made by Node.js to Github Pages?

I was able to set up github actions to automatically commit the results of a node build command (yarn build in my case but it should work with npm too) to the gh-pages branch whenever a new commit is pushed to master.

While not completely ideal as i'd like to avoid committing the built files, it seems like this is currently the only way to publish to github pages.

I based my workflow off of this guide for a different react library, and had to make the following changes to get it to work for me:

• updated the "setup node" step to use the version found here since the one from the sample i was basing it off of was throwing errors because it could not find the correct action.
• remove the line containing yarn export because that command does not exist and it doesn't seem to add anything helpful (you may also want to change the build line above it to suit your needs)
• I also added an env directive to the yarn build step so that I can include the SHA hash of the commit that generated the build inside my app, but this is optional

Here is my full github action:

name: github pages

on:
    push:
        branches:
        - master

jobs:
    deploy:
        runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
        steps:
        - uses: actions/checkout@v2

        - name: Setup Node
            uses: actions/setup-node@v2-beta
            with:
            node-version: '12'

        - name: Get yarn cache
            id: yarn-cache
            run: echo "::set-output name=dir::$(yarn cache dir)"

        - name: Cache dependencies
            uses: actions/cache@v2
            with:
            path: ${{ steps.yarn-cache.outputs.dir }}
            key: ${{ runner.os }}-yarn-${{ hashFiles('**/yarn.lock') }}
            restore-keys: |
                ${{ runner.os }}-yarn-
        - run: yarn install --frozen-lockfile
        - run: yarn build
            env:
            REACT_APP_GIT_SHA: ${{ github.SHA }}

        - name: Deploy
            uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
            with:
            github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
            publish_dir: ./build

Alternative solution

The docs for next.js also provides instructions for setting up with Vercel which appears to be a hosting service for node.js apps similar to github pages. I have not tried this though and so cannot speak to how well it works.