This is a set up for projects which want to check in only their source files, but have their gh-pages branch automatically updated with some compiled output every time they push.
You want a script that does a local compile to e.g. an out/ directory. Let's call this compile.sh for our purposes, but for your project it might be npm build or gulp make-docs or anything similar.
Check this in to your project.
Create a deploy script, call it deploy.sh, with the following contents:
#!/bin/bash
set -e
rm -rf out || exit 0;
mkdir out;
./compile.sh
cd out
git init
git config user.name "Travis-CI"
git config user.email "<you>@<your-email>"
git add .
git commit -m "Deploy to GitHub Pages"
git push --force --quiet "https://${GH_TOKEN}@${GH_REF}" master:gh-pages > /dev/null 2>&1You can run this deploy script locally if you like, with
GH_TOKEN=<your password> GH_REF=github.com/<your name>/<your repo>.git ./deploy.sh
But that's no fun. We want this to happen automatically every time you push. To do that, we'll use Travis CI.
Get an account at https://travis-ci.org/. Turn on Travis for your repository in question, using the Travis control panel.
The trickiest part of all this is that you want to give Travis the ability to run your deploy script and push changes to gh-pages, without checking in the necessary credentials to your repo. The solution for this is to use Travis's encryption support.
We'll generate a GitHub personal access token (essentially an application-specific password) and encrypt it, then put the encrypted version in our .travis.yml file. Then we can check in the .travis.yml file with no issues.
First, generate a token at https://github.com/settings/applications
Then, install the Travis client and do
travis encrypt GH_TOKEN=<secret token here>
This will give you a very long line like
secure: "<.... encrypted data ....>"
With all this in hand, you can create a .travis.yml file. It should look like this:
script: bash ./deploy.sh
env:
global:
- GH_REF: github.com/<your name>/<your repo>.git
- secure: "<.... encrypted data from above ....>"At this point you should have 2-3 files checked in to your repo: compile.sh, deploy.sh, and .travis.yml. If you've also told Travis about your repo, then the first time you push to GitHub with these changes, it will automatically compile and deploy your source!
I use basically this exact setup for http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/promises-guide (which is hosted on gh-pages; the w3.org URL is a proxy to that). The relevant files are:
https://github.com/w3ctag/promises-guide/blob/master/.travis.yml https://github.com/w3ctag/promises-guide/blob/master/deploy-gh-pages.sh
I had the same problem as @dspinellis. I was getting the following error:
So I changed to point to ../deploy.enc so: