Using Solid Start with GitHub pages

⚠ Warning: the information in this article is outdated. There is a new version of solid-start that contains multiple breaking changes. I have prepared an updated article for you.

You may or may not yet have heard about Solid Start, which is the much anticipated upcoming meta framework for Solid.js currently being in beta.

One of the valuable features of Solid Start is that you can use so-called "adapters" to completely change the output into something deployable basically everywhere that serves pages and with quite a lot of options: there are adapters for amazon web services, cloudflare pages and workers, deno deploy, netlify, standard node server (the default), vercel, and static deployment - the latter allows us to build something that we can put on github pages.

Creating your project

In order to create such a project, you can create your directory and from inside, use

npm init solid@latest
npm add --save-dev solid-start-static
npm remove solid-start-node

(or use pnpm create/add/remove instead of npm if you like that better), then choose whatever template you want to use for your project.

If you are using a version of solid-start prior to 0.2.21, you'll find an issue that prevents the initial hydration of pages with a base path different than the root. If you are using a newer version, you can skip that part and continue below.

To patch solid-start, create a file called solid-start-use-base-path-in-client-router.patch with the following content:

diff --git a/node_modules/solid-start/entry-client/StartClient.tsx b/node_modules/solid-start/entry-client/StartClient.tsx
index c17a8e5f..6569d504 100644
--- a/node_modules/solid-start/entry-client/StartClient.tsx
+++ b/node_modules/solid-start/entry-client/StartClient.tsx
@@ -83,7 +83,7 @@ export default () => {
   return (
     <ServerContext.Provider value={mockFetchEvent}>
       <MetaProvider>
-        <StartRouter data={dataFn}>
+        <StartRouter base={import.meta.env.BASE_URL} data={dataFn}>
           <Root />
         </StartRouter>
       </MetaProvider>

Then add a postinstall script that applies the patch (this expects that you have patch available in your path) to package.json:

{
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "patch -Np1 -i solid-start-use-base-path-in-client-router.patch"
  }
}

Once you update to a package that includes the fix, you can safely remove the script and the patch file. If the postinstall step fails, this might be the case.

Install the dependencies

Once you set up the package, install the dependencies:

npm install  # or pnpm install

Configure vite

Next, you need to configure vite in vite.config.js/ts so that it will shape the output into something working on GitHub pages:

import solid from "solid-start/vite";
import staticAdapter from "solid-start-static";
import { defineConfig } from "vite";

export default defineConfig({
  base: "/my-project/",
  // insert your github project name between slashes above
  plugins: [solid({ adapter: staticAdapter() })],
});

Create a GitHub action to deploy the page

Finally, create a file .github/workflows/main.yml and add the following actions:

name: CI

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: install
        run: npm i --legacy-peer-deps

      - name: build
        run: npm run build

      - name: deploy pages
        uses: JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@v4.4.1
        with:
          branch: gh-pages
          folder: dist/public

Push to your repository and wait for the action to finish (have a look in the Actions tab of your project).

Enable GitHub pages for your project

Once the action finished,

• Go to your project's GitHub page and on there to the settings tab
• in the left menu, select pages
• for branch, select gh-pages and / (Root)

It may take a few seconds up to two minutes. After that, you can take a look at your freshly deployed GitHub page with your solid-start project.

Happy hacking!