Move blog to github and automate deploying with git hooks

This blog is powered by Pelican and hosted through GitHub using GitHub Pages.

In this post we will describe how to move blog to github and automate git hooks to update gh -pages branch on commits.

For those of you not familiar with these technologies, Pelican is a static site generator - meaning you can write your content in a format such as Markdown or Jupyter notebook(ipynb) and Pelican will automatically generate the HTML files for you; and GitHub Pages is a service provided by GitHub for hosting a website under the .github.io URL.

Previously when blog was hosted on bitbucket we solve it using two separate repositories: one for the website "source" files, and one for the output which was be served using bitbucket.io.

But i decide to move to one repository with different branches. This is how to achieve this:

The first step is to create two branches:

• master will contain the blog's "source" files, namely - all the files such as the content folder which contains the actual posts, and pelicanconf.py file.
• gh-pages will contain only the contents of output.

Github will use gh-pages branch for serving Blog pages

Then update your .gitignore file with output\ folder.

To automate lets create pre-push git hook in .git/hooks/pre-push:

#!/bin/sh

while read local_ref local_sha remote_ref remote_sha
do
        if [ "$remote_ref" = "refs/heads/master" ]
        then
                pelican content -o output -s publishconf.py
                ghp-import -m "Update with latest content" output
                git push --no-verify origin gh-pages
        fi
done

exit 0

1. The first thing the script does is iterating over the commits that are about to be pushed. Specifically, only commits that are pushed to the master branch are of interest to us.
2. If commits are pushed to master, it executes pelican command using publishconf.py. This will generate the production version of the blog into output.
3. The GitHub Pages Import tool is used for copying the contents of output to a branch named gh-pages with provided commit message.
4. gh-pages is pushed to the remote gh-pages branch. --no-verify skips the pre-push hook so this script won't run again.

Now, whenever I push to source to master branch i get fresh version of my static site on github pages at the same time.

We can use different ways to achieve the same goal, check this post Using git worktree for deploying to GitHub Pages about git worktree automation.

We can even build pages on remote servers, check this GitHub Pages Pelican Build Action and GitHub Pages Pelican Build Action Demo for example.