Use direct deployment to GitHub Pages instead of branch-based

[JamesMGreene]

Building off Gabe's work in PR #79, this PR moves from using branch-based deployments to direct deployments for GitHub Pages. 🚀

Background

Since July, GitHub Pages has offered the ability to deploy directly from custom Actions workflows instead of requiring users to push their deployable content into a specified branch (e.g. gh-pages) or directory within the repository.

For repositories not using Jekyll, this offers a huge increase in the flexibility and freedom of what can easily be deployed to GitHub Pages without the extra acrobatics of clever third-party Actions such as JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@v4. ❤️ 🤸

Why?

• This eliminates the need to maintain a separate gh-pages branch
• This eliminates the second of the 2 Actions workflows involved in your current deployment strategy:
  1. Explicit: actions/workflows/build-and-deploy.yml
  2. Implicit: actions/workflows/pages/pages-build-deployment
• This should represent a fairly significant drop in overall time to successful deployment:
  • The combined durations of your latest workflow runs (2 workflows ☝🏻), [1] + [2], totaled up to ~3.5 minutes, plus time spent waiting in the queue between the 2 runs
  • My latest workflow run finished in just under 2 minutes
• This positions the project to take advantage of future enhancements to GitHub Pages, such as eventual PR preview deployment capabilities ⏳

Demo

Using this deployment workflow for my fork, you can see it currently hosted on GitHub Pages:

• https://jamesmgreene.github.io/loteria-cielo/ 👀

TODO

Before merging

• [x] Change your Pages deployment mechanism to "GitHub Actions" instead of "Deploy from a branch": settings/pages
  • Documentation: Publishing with a custom GitHub Actions workflow

After merging

• [x] Delete the gh-pages branch: branches/all?query=gh-pages