I built a website on github and would like to protect it from someone copying my repository and running the same website (either online or offline for themselves).

The website is fairly basic and builds on github action, which excute on schedule a Rmarkdown file that produces (updates) the index.html file. I want to avoid people being able to copy and freely execute that Rmarkdown file. I wonder if I could encrypt that specific file, and simply use a secret key with github actions to decrypt it when updating the website. Is this possible and would it be a good solution?

I also thought about having a private repository with my Rmarkdown file and simply push the html file to the public repository via github action, the problem is the github action takes a while to execute and I would quickly run out of the computation time (2000-3000 mins/month) offered by github.

CodePudding user response：

I also thought about having a private repository with my Rmarkdown file and simply push the html file to the public repository via github action

That would have been the first approach, but since the RMarkdown process consumes to much tasks, it needs to be executed elsewhere.
Since other online free plans (like RStudio Cloud) are also limited in their project hours per month, another approach would be to call your own managed server (for instance, a Google Cloud compute engine, or Digital Ocean Droplet) where:

• the RMarkdown file would reside (meaning, it would not be in the GitHub repository at all: no need to obfuscate/encrypt anything)
• the process can take place
• the generated index.html can uploaded back to your repository, and the rest of your GitHub action can publish the pages.