jekyll-hook

A server that listens for webhook posts from GitHub, generates a website with Jekyll, and moves it somewhere to be published. Use this to run your own GitHub Pages-style web server. Great for when you need to serve your websites behind a firewall, need extra server-level features like HTTP basic auth (see below for an NGINX config with basic auth), or want to host your site directly on a CDN or file host like S3. It's cutomizable with two user-configurable shell scripts and a config file.

Installation

run $ npm install to install app dependencies
Set a Web hook on your GitHub repository that points to your jekyll-hook server http://example.com:8080/hooks/jekyll/:branch, where :branch is the branch you want to publish. Usually this is gh-pages or master for *.github.com / *.github.io repositories.

Configuration

Adjust build.sh and publish.sh to suit your workflow. By default, they generate a site with Jekyll and publish it to an NGINX web directory.

Copy config.sample.json to config.json in the root directory and customize.

Configuration attributes:

gh_server The GitHub server from which to pull code
temp A directory to store code and site files
scripts
- build A script to run to build the site
- publish A script to run to publish the site
email Optional. Settings for sending email alerts
- user Sending email account's user name (e.g. example@gmail.com)
- password Sending email account's password
- host SMTP host for sending email account (e.g. smtp.gmail.com)
- ssl true or false for SSL
accounts An array of accounts or organizations whose repositories can be used with this server

Usage

run as executable: $ ./jekyll-hook.js

Publishing content

The stock build.sh copies rendered site files to subdirectories under a web server's www root directory. For instance, use this script and NGINX with the following configuration file to serve static content behind HTTP basic authentication:

server {
    root /usr/share/nginx/www;
    index index.html index.htm;

    # Make site accessible from http://localhost/
    server_name localhost;

    location / {
        # First attempt to serve request as file, then
        # as directory, then fall back to index.html
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;

        # Optional basic auth restriction
        # auth_basic "Restricted";
        # auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;
    }
}

Replace this script with whatever you need for your particular hosting environment.

You probably want to configure your server to only respond POST requests from GitHub's public IP addresses, found on the webhooks settings page.

Dependencies

Here's a sample script to install the approriate dependencies on an Ubunutu server: