Deploy Jekyll Site To Github With Make

At risks of being too meta, I want to talk about how this post is going to go from my computer to a repository on Github on both the master and gh-pages branch. The former contains the file I'm typing, and the latter an updated HTML site generated by Jekyll.

Here's how: I type make deploy once I commit this file in my local repository.

I spent a day to set up a Jekyll site. The last part involves deploying it to Github, my preferred way to host a static site. There are a lot of posts and scripts on how to achieve it. And Github seems to have an "afficial" support for Jekyll site that disables plugin scripts (understandably so).

But having worked with git and make for all these years made me immune to all the fanciness the Internet tries to sell.

Here's my script for deploying a Jekyll project to Github pages:

DEPLOY_PATH=/tmp/jekyll_deploy
build:
	jekyll build

deploy:
	git checkout -f gh-pages
	git clean -d -x -f
	git pull
	git checkout master
	jekyll build
	rm -rf ${DEPLOY_PATH}
	mkdir ${DEPLOY_PATH}
	cp -R .git ${DEPLOY_PATH}
	cd ${DEPLOY_PATH}; git checkout gh-pages; git clean -d -x -f
	cp -R _site/* ${DEPLOY_PATH}
	cd ${DEPLOY_PATH}; git add .; git commit -m "`curl whatthecommit.com/index.txt`"
	cd ${DEPLOY_PATH}; git push -f origin gh-pages

Drop it into root of your Jekyll project, commit all changes (including the Makefile). And type make deploy. BOOM, done.

There are a couple of assumptions:

• You build the site in the _site folder
• You store Jekyll source on master and have the gh-pages branch up.
• You can build the site by running jekyll build.
• You don't care about commit message on the deploy branch.

I like it better than other methods because it does not require installing additional software/scripts and there's no restriction on plugins.