One line deployment of your site to gh-pages

Do you want to easily deploy your site to Github pages?

OK, here we go...

1. You have to upload your complete blog/site to a new Github repository (you know how to do it... if not, probably you need to learn some things before try this one, hehe). As a plus, now your blog/site is version-controlled!

2. Almost for sure, your site/blog lives in the master branch of the new repository, but you need to generated a gh-pages branch to push your build or output folder, I mean your site/blog content to deploy... not all the machinery of your site/blog platform (Nikola in my case):

   • git checkout -b gh-pages
   • git rm -rf .
   • git commit -am "First commit to gh-pages branch"
   • git push origin gh-pages

3. Now, we will use a git-subtree technique to push the build or output content to the gh-pages branch:

   • git checkout master

   • git push origin `git subtree split --prefix output gh-pages`:gh-pages --force

     Sweet line... uhh ;-)

4. Finally, you will need to run the following line every time you want to update your site/blog!

   • git subtree push --prefix output origin gh-pages

Note: Are you getting git errors? Just use the sweet line again and force the update...

If you are using Nikola, you can add some of this lines to the DEPLOY_COMMANDS in your conf.py file and just run nikola deploy after building your site/blog.

More easier... impossible... ;-)

Damián.

UPDATE: Not enough happy with step 3 and 4 (essentially because of some git errors), I figured out a cleaner solution:

New 3. Now, we will use a git-subtree technique to push the build or output content to the gh-pages branch. You will need to run the following lines every time you want to update your site/blog!

• git checkout master # you can avoid this line if you are in master...
• git subtree split --prefix output -b gh-pages # create a local gh-pages branch containing the splitted output folder
• git push -f origin gh-pages:gh-pages # force the push of the gh-pages branch to the remote gh-pages branch at origin
• git branch -D gh-pages # delete the local gh-pages because you will need it: ref