As part of gunicorn, Benoit Chesneau and I have been starting to look at how to host documentation. There's the obvious method of using GitHub's post-receive hook to trigger doc builds and rsync to a webserver, but we ended up wanting to try out github's hosting to make the whole interface a bit more robust.
GitHub Pages is a pretty awesome service that GitHub provides for
hosting project documentation. The only thing is that it requires a
gh-pages
branch that is the site's document root. This means that keeping
documentation sources in the branch with code is a bit difficult. And it really
turns into a head scratcher for things like Sphinx that want to
access documentation sources and code sources at the same time.
Then I stumbled across an interesting looking package called
github-tools that looked almost like what I wanted. It was a tad
complicated and more involved than I wanted but it gave me an idear. Why not
just write a script that can copy a directory to the gh-pages
branch of the
repository. This saves me from even having to think about the branch and
everything becomes magical.
This is what ghp-import
was written for.
This will DESTROY your gh-pages
branch. If you love it, you'll want to
take backups before playing with this. This script assumes that gh-pages
is
100% derivative. You should never edit files in your gh-pages
branch by hand
if you're using this script because you will lose your work.
Usage: ghp-import [OPTIONS] DIRECTORY
Options:
-n, --no-jekyll Include a .nojekyll file in the branch.
-c CNAME, --cname=CNAME
Write a CNAME file with the given CNAME.
-m MESG, --message=MESG
The commit message to use on the target branch.
-p, --push Push the branch to origin/{branch} after committing.
-f, --force Force the push to the repository
-r REMOTE, --remote=REMOTE
The name of the remote to push to. [origin]
-b BRANCH, --branch=BRANCH
Name of the branch to write to. [gh-pages]
-s, --shell Use the shell when invoking Git. [False]
-l, --follow-links Follow symlinks when adding files. [False]
-h, --help show this help message and exit
Its pretty simple. Inside your repository just run ghp-import $DOCS_DIR
where $DOCS_DIR
is the path to the built documentation. This will write a
commit to your gh-pages
branch with the current documents in it.
If you specify -p
it will also attempt to push the gh-pages
branch to
GitHub. By default it'll just run git push origin gh-pages
. You can specify
a different remote using the -r
flag.
You can specify a different branch with -b
. This is useful for user and
organization page, which are served from the master
branch.
Some Windows users report needing to pass Git commands through the shell which can be accomplished by passing -s
.
The -l
option will cause the import to follow symlinks for users that have odd configurations that include symlinking outside of their documentation directory.
ghp-import
is distributed under the Tumbolia Public License. See the LICENSE
file for more information.