GitHub pages does not support plugins, but plugins are clearly very useful (e.g. jekyll-scholar).
Nitrous.io supports adding plugins to your GH pages site, but this seems a little involved. Is there any simply way to get plugins working on my github site, or should I just make _site/ the root, as the jekyll-scholar dev. recommends?
The method described in the Nitrous.io blog post can actually be used with a local Ruby/Rails environment, which removes some of the complexity. There's an even more convenient Rakefile setup from David Ensinger that implements the deployment steps proposed by Randy Morris.
Essentially, these Rakefiles are just conveniences to batch the deployment of both your Jekyll source (with plugins) and compiled _site to GitHub Pages as the jekyll-scholar dev recommends. Since your site is a User Pages (username.github.io), then you'll want your compiled _site to end up in Master, and your Jekyll source with plugins in a separate Source branch. If you want to first experiment with a Project Page, then you'll want your _site to end up in the gh-pages branch (which can be accomplished with this Rakefile)
Related
I am a total programming noob and assume I'm missing something basic.
I forked this repo: https://github.com/colinmorris/tour-of-heroes
Here is the author's page for that repo: https://colinmorris.github.io/tour-of-heroes/
My fork: https://github.com/SmallFryHero/tour-of-heroes
My page based on that fork: https://smallfryhero.github.io/tour-of-heroes/
My page does not load.
I deployed the Github Pages using the gh-pages branch and from the /root folder.
I imported the code into a different web editor, CodeSandBox, and I can get it to run there along with my changes.
What do I need to fix to get it to run on my Github Pages? I added a readme to get the page to build. It seems to be deployed, but doesn't get past the "loading..." step.
Thanks for any help! Sorry for the total noob question.
The issue is that GitHub Pages, by default, use a static site generator called Jekyll under the hood. It basically converts a set of Markdown files into HTML (and provides templating, themes, plugins, and more).
In the case of your repo, which consists exclusively of static assets, Jekyll doesn't do much, but it does exclude the node_modules directory (see logs), which leads to the scripts in there being unavailable to the deployed page.
To fix this, you can indicate that you wish to skip any Jekyll processing and just upload the files as they are; to do so, add an empty file .nojekyll to the root directory in the gh-pages branch, as described in the documentation.
The repo from which you forked was last deployed multiple years ago, and I suspect the Jekyll default configuration back then didn't exclude node_modules yet.
Following page page points to Github's page where pre-build binaries are contained. If I have not found first mentioned page first then I would have not an idea that such page (with pre-build binaries) exists on Github. Is it usual to put some pre-build binaries under releases on GitHub (I've seen it also other times e.g. with gns3)? Is there any link on project's Github page which will point me to releases (maybe I can add releases to corresponding URL but I guess there must be some link which points to it)
The "release" pages is available on any GitHub project. You can access it quickly using the link on top of project (between branches and contributors):
GitHub release page is computed from Git repository tags. The maintainer of the project is free to use it or not, but it's a common practice to transform a git tag into a release, attaching a description (changelog, release note, etc) and/or some files (pre-build packages, setups, DMGs, etc.)
GitHub team wrote a blog post a few years ago to explain this feature.
I need to host the documentation of multiple versions of my project (say 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0) and all are active (documentation)branches and we shall keep on adding improvements to all of these.
Is it possible to use GitHub pages for this purpose?
Appreciate any help on this.
This is feasible using Github Actions along with a static site generator (SSG) of your choice such as VuePress, Gatsby, Jekyll etc.
In its simplest form, create a GH action to generate the static site folder of the branch/release, then push the folder to corresponding folder in the branch pointed to by GH pages, say gh-pages. One of the branches/releases should be pushed to root. GitHub Pages Deploy Action can be helpful. Lastly add a dropdown list of versions to your static website pointing to the matching folder. The list of items can be statically maintained or dynamically populated using GitHub API. The selected item depends on the current URL path.
Example:
To provide multi-version docs for software product NotifyBC,
input - docs folder of the product created by VuePress
output - gh-pages branch
GitHub action, with main branch pushed to root of gh-pages branch and releases pushed to version folder
dynamically populated dropdown list implemented in Vue component
rendered site powered by GH pages
You can have a look at gh-pages-multi.
It is a small nodejs tool I wrote to push different versions of docs to subdirectories in a gh-pages branch. It also generates a index.html file listing those subdirectories.
It is fairly easy to integrate in a CI workflow if you want to automate building and pushing the docs.
Also note the "--no-history" option that will prevent bloating the git repo if your docs contain some built files or binary assets.
These other answers over-complicate things. As #jhpratt suggests in the comment, you can just copy the code corresponding to a version of your site you want to deploy to a dir (labelled e.g. v1.0) within the dir that you deploy to gh-pages. You then access the version with https://your-name.github.io/your-repo/v1.0/.
Of course, depending on the type of site you're building you may have to worry about the content of <base href="..."> tag, etc., for each version, but you need to worry about this tag in any case since github pages do not deploy to the url root.
The documentation of Jekyll tells me, that the _site-directory of a Jekyll site contains the compiled version of the site I have created after running
Jekyll build
Several articles recommend, that I include the _site-directory in my .gitignore-file because "it just contains the compiled version of my site". (that's what some articles recommend. So, I am not sure if I don't understand some concept of Jekyll or some concept of Git.
If the _site-directory contains the compiled version of a site, shouldn't that be the thing that is on the server the provides the final website? I do understand why you put source code on github and what to do with it, but in the case of github pages, Github is not a versioning system but a file hosting system and the file hosting system should host compiled versions of my work to provide it via MyUsername.github.io to users, right?
My question is: shouldn't it be only the _site-directory of my Jekyll website that I deploy to Github because that should be the compiled source code that github provides to users? So, shouldn't I put anything else in the .gitignore-file EXCEPT the _site-directory?
If I got this all wrong: what is the point in compiling my website via
Jekyll build
if I don't use the compiled source code for anything?
Two solutions :
You don't use Jekyll plugins (or only those supported by github pages)
You build your site only if you need to test it locally (jekyll build or jekyll serve). The generated code (in _site) will not be versioned as github pages will generate pages from the sources.
Put _site to .gitignore
Push you sources to github pages
You use Jekyll plugins
In this case, you need to build locally because Github pages cannot do the job with plugins.
Jekyll build locally
Put _site to .gitignore
commit your sources in one branch
commit your _site in another branch
See this post for more explanations.
I think the point where you are confused is that most of the tutorials talk about at least two different repositories.
the source code of your site, this is where you call Jekyll build
the compiled result, this is the one where you put the contents of the _site directory
Then it makes sense to ignore _site in case 1. out of the same reason you normally ignore compilation results: they are not meant to be tracked because they might change between every compilation without changing the source, so you would have to commit after every build although nothing (visible) has changed.
For repository 2. you of course have to update it with the contents of _site from repository 1 after your build.
Having said that you can of course combine 1. and 2. into a single repository by using master for the contents of _site and another branch e.g. source for the project with the Jekyll build files, here ignoring _site and then updating the master branch with the contents of it after changes.
the _site folder is cleared and all files inside are re-generated upon each "jekyll build". tracking a file that is to be removed seems to serve no useful purposes.
if you are thinking to git push your jekyll site to your github repo as a project page (gh-pages), the _site folder again serves no purposes as the jekyll installation at github will generate the _site for you automatically upon your files upload (git push).
the _site folder is useful only for local preview of your jekyll site (typically to be found at localhost:4000 by default).
I believe you might be looking at things the wrong way, It makes sense to ignore _site since every time you jekyll build your _site gets blasted, everything in there gets erased and written again.
So in my own opinion what you would like to push to github is the working directory since it's there where you work and all your changes are being versioned... with the plus of github doing the compiling and automatically building the site.
That being said, I usually keep _site out of my gitignore since I deploy to another hosting service and my deployment framework grabs the github repository and deploys from a particular branch I need the _site to be there.
Right now i have the following setup:
My jeyll build is in ~/jekyll-sites
My .git folder is in ~/jekyll-sites/_site
I'm now able to sync the jekyll generated ~/jekyll-sites/_site with my repo at: https://github.com/nielsrasmus/nielsrasmus.github.io
and it works perfect.
But i would also like to to save the whole jekyll build on github.
The question is:
Is it possible to make another repo called: nielsrasmus.github.io-source and sync the whole jekyll build here?
If so, what would be the best way to do it?
I've looked at so many answers that does not quite match what I want. So I'm pretty confused right now :-/
As long as you're not using any Jekyll plugins, you can actually push your Jekyll source to Github, and their servers will automatically generate the _site folder and serve it for you. You won't see this _site directory show up in your repository, but the generated files will be accessible from http://nielsrasmus.github.io
A great reference for how to do this is Tom Preston-Warner's personal blog, which is (naturally) hosted on Github Pages. Note that he placed the _site directory in his .gitgnore file, and Jekyll says "it's probably a good idea" for you to do the same, but you might be able to skip this part.
Both you and Tom are using the User Pages option, so your site gets generated as long as your content is in the Master branch (if you were using Project pages, it would use the gh-pages branch instead).
I think I solved the issue.
I installed the mac version of github and fiddled around, read a lot of man pages and finally I could make it happen :-)
What helped me was to click on the + sign in the bottom of the screen, as shown on the screenshot. Here I could point my repos at a local dir.
nielsrasmus/jekyll-sites: points to the root of the jekyll build.
nielsrasmus/nielsrasmus.github.io: points to the generated site at ~/jekyll-sites/_site