rsync total size is 0 speedup is 0.00

While wiring GitHub Actions to deploy a static site to my VPS, the sync finished with files present but empty. rsync reported “total size is 0 speedup is 0.00”. Time to investigate.

What Happened

Command used:

rsync -zvr -e ssh public root@1991421.cn:/var/www/blog

Output:

rsync total size is 0 speedup is 0.00

Logging into the VPS confirmed every file was empty:

Tried SCP:

scp -r public root@1991421.cn:/var/www/blog/public

Same result: empty files.

Troubleshooting

• Both rsync and scp failed → not a command syntax issue.
• Wrong SSH key would show a different error.
• Forcing the runner to macOS didn’t help.

So the difference had to be between local and CI environments. Google didn’t turn up much on “total size is 0 speedup is 0.00”, so I asked the action’s author. The answer was blunt: if speed is zero, the files already contain zero bytes. 🤯

That hint led me to re-check the build process. Locally I ran Node v10; on GitHub Actions it was Node 14.x. Hexo (the static generator) depends on Node, so a version mismatch could easily break the output.

After aligning Node versions, deployment worked:

Lessons Learned

• Hexo is built on Node.js; keep versions consistent across environments.
• When rsync reports zero size and zero speed, suspect empty source files.
• GitHub Actions turned out faster than Travis for this workflow—another bonus once the bug was fixed.