Jekyll Plugins and Github Pages

03 Mar 2014

First of all:

Github Pages works in safe mode in which most of the Jekyll plugins can not work.

So we can not use Jekyll plugins on github pages, even you have marked it to safe. If you have tried, you will know.

We must use the other way:

Build the site content locally, then push the content to Github.

Solution

If we do not use plugins, we only need a branch:

gh-pages for project page.
or master for Person or Organization Page.

We push the origin document, Github will build them into Site Content into the destiantion directory.

Now we need another branch for the origin destiantion, for example: docs.

Build locally

We build the site content in docs branch into the description directory, for example, _site.
```
git checkout docs
# some other code

# commit
git commit -a -m 'udpate content'

# build
jekyll build
```
Please remember add _site to .gitignore and commit the changes in docs.

Push

Checkout ph-pages or master, remove the old content, copy the content in _site to the root directory of the repositor.

git checkout gh-pages
ls | grep -v _site|xargs rm -rf
cp -r _site/* .
rm -rf _site/
touch .nojekyll

# commit
git commit -a -m 'update content'

git push --all origin

The take away:

publish-gh-pages.sh

#!/bin/bash

function exe_cmd() {
    echo $1
    eval $1
}

if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo "Usage: sh $0 [ gh-pages | master ]"
    exit
fi

branch=$1
if [ -z "$branch" ] || [ "$branch" != "master" ]; then
    branch='gh-pages'
fi

exe_cmd "jekyll build"
if [ ! -d '_site' ];then
    echo "not content to be published"
    exit
fi

exe_cmd "git checkout $branch"
error_code=$?
if [ $error_code != 0 ];then
    echo 'Switch branch fail.'
    exit
else
    ls | grep -v _site|xargs rm -rf
    exe_cmd "cp -r _site/* ."
    exe_cmd "rm -rf _site/"
    exe_cmd "touch .nojekyll"
fi