Easy Syncing of GitHub Pages
I’ve started using GitHub more and more recently as I’m finding Git’s steep learning curve, as compared to SVN, outweighed by GitHub’s usefulness and flexibility. One of those factors is GitHub’s “Pages” feature. From the docs:
The GitHub Pages feature allows you to publish content to the web by simply pushing content to one of your GitHub hosted repositories.
For example, I’ve recently started a repo to begin adding the many miscellaneous tests, POCs and demos I create during the course of development. Instead of requiring someone to download the repo just to see the examples, I use GitHub Pages to host the rendered version (when applicable). The “Mimicking Links” page is the first one I’ve published.
GitHub makes this automatic when you create a branch of your master
named gh-pages
. Any time you push to gh-pages
, the results are published. Easy enough, but I quickly realized that I needed a way to mirror all changes on master
in gh-pages
without constantly having to type:
git checkout gh-pages git merge master git push origin gh-pages git checkout master
Some quick searching turned up Oli Studholme’s helpful post “GitHub Pages and deleting git’s master branch”. He outlines his own attempts (and suggestions from the comments) and what finally worked for him. Since he had more requirements (deleting the master
branch), I wanted to post exactly what I’ve ended on.
First, create your local repo and add it to GitHub.
From the command line, navigate into the root of your repo and run following block of code as referenced in the “Project Pages” section of the GitHub Pages docs (make sure you have no changes waiting to be committed):
git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/gh-pages rm .git/index git clean -fdx
Now that your working directory is clean, merge in the master
branch and push gh-pages
to GitHub:
git merge master git push origin gh-pages
You can now visit the url http:username.github.com/yourRepo/
to view the results (the first push may take a little time to show your changes).
Now that your pages are in place, you’ll want to automate the merging[1] to gh-pages
any changes you commit in master
.
To do this, open the post-commit.sample
file located in yourRepo/.git/hooks
and replace its contents with the following, saving it as post-commit
:
#!/bin/sh # Mirror master in gh-pages git checkout gh-pages git merge master git checkout master
This block will run after every commit you make to the master
branch (you’ll see the output on the command line).
All that’s left to do is push both branches to GitHub any time you’ve made a commit:
git push --all
I’m still pretty new to Git/GitHub, so any suggestions or corrections are appreciated.
-
Oli’s post suggests
rebase
, but I’m sticking withmerge
as I understand it better. ↩