A simple way to publish your site to GitHub

November 22, 2014 | 1 Minute Read

Jekyll is a wonderful templating engine which works perfectly with GitHub. You can have your wonderful static website up and running in few minutes, hosted and built seamlessly by Github.

There is indeed a limitation to this perfect world: GitHub will build Jekyll in –safe mode thus not allowing any Jekyll plugin.

I have been struggling to find a noob way to publish my GitHub page and version the source control at the same time.

A quick & dirty solution is to create two local repositories pointing to the corresponding GitHub remotes: master (for the site) and source (for the source code). First let’s setup the local folders.

mkdir master
mkdir source

cd master
git init
git remote add -t master origin <remote-url>

cd ../source
git init
git remote add -t source origin <remote-url>

With the folders created as before, you can then install Jekyll in source, make your editing. Then create a small shell script that will:

1. Build Jekyll
2. Copy the site to the master folder
3. Push it to GitHub

#!/bin/sh
jekyll build
cd _site
cp -r * ../../master/
cd ../../master
git add --all
git commit -m "Updating blog"
git push -f origin master
cd ../source