As part of gunicorn, me and Benoit Chesneau have been starting to look at how to host documentation. There's the obvious method of using GitHub's post-update hooks 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: -m MESG The commit message to use on the gh-pages branch. -p Push the branch to origin/gh-pages after committing. -r REMOTE The name of the remote to push to. [origin] -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.
ghp-import is distributed under the Tumbolia Public License. See the LICENSE file for more information.