Automating GitHub pages

You can use Travis and git-update-ghpages to automatically update your website’s gh-pages branch.

Generate a GitHub token

Generate a GitHub token. Travis will use this to push to your repository on your behalf. You can use any name, but you can call it Travis CI. Keep this token somewhere safe; you can use it for any of your repositories that will need git-update-ghpages deployments.

Adding your token

Make sure Travis is already enabled on your repository. Go to your Travis’s repo’s settings page (https://travis-ci.org/user/repo/settings), and add your token there as GITHUB_TOKEN. Be sure to turn off the “show this in build log” option.

Alternatively, you can also use the Travis CLI tool to add this to your repo as a secure variable:

travis encrypt GITHUB_TOKEN="your token here" --add

Configuring builds

If you installed Docpress locally in your project, skip to the next section.

Add this to your .travis.yml manifest. This will make a build happen after your test, then a deployment right after that. In this example, we’re deploying _docs to user/repo.

.travis.yml

language: node_js
node_js:
- 10

env:
  global:
    - GIT_NAME: Travis CI
    - GIT_EMAIL: nobody@nobody.org
    - GITHUB_REPO: rstacruz/myproject
    - GIT_SOURCE: _docpress

script:
- rake     # ...or whatever your test command is
- npm install docpress && ./node_modules/.bin/docpress build

after_success:
- if [ "$TRAVIS_BRANCH" = "master" -a "$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST" = "false" ]; then npm install git-update-ghpages && ./node_modules/.bin/git-update-ghpages -e; fi

For Node.js projects

If your project is a Node.js project, you can simplify this by adding docpress and git-update-ghpages to your devDependencies.

npm install --save-dev --save-exact docpress
npm install --save-dev --save-exact git-update-ghpages

# .travis.yml
node_js:
- 10

env:
  global:
    - GIT_NAME: Travis CI
    - GIT_EMAIL: nobody@nobody.org
    - GITHUB_REPO: rstacruz/myproject
    - GIT_SOURCE: _docpress

script:
- rake     # ...or whatever your test command is
- ./node_modules/.bin/docpress build

after_success:
- if [ "$TRAVIS_BRANCH" = "master" -a "$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST" = "false" ]; then ./node_modules/.bin/git-update-ghpages -e; fi

For non-JS projects

The configuration above has language: node_js, which may not be what you want. In this case, swap out the language and node_js fields to invoke nvm before_install:

.travis.yml

- language: node_js
- node_js:
- - 4
+ before_install:
+ - nvm install 4