Deploying a subfolder to GitHub Pages

Sometimes you want to have a subdirectory on some branch be the root directory of a repository’s master branch.

For the sake of this example, let’s pretend the subfolder containing your site is named dist.

Step 1

Remove the dist directory from the project’s .gitignore file.

Step 2

Make sure git knows about your subtree (the subfolder with your site).

git add dist && git commit -m "Initial dist subtree commit"

Step 3

Use subtree push to send it to the master branch on GitHub.

git subtree push --prefix dist origin master

Boom. If your folder isn’t called dist, then you’ll need to change that in each of the commands above.

---

If you do this on a regular basis, you could also create a script containing the following somewhere in your path:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
  echo "Which folder do you want to deploy to GitHub Pages?"
  exit 1
fi
git subtree push --prefix $1 origin master

Which lets you type commands like:

git gh-deploy path/to/your/site