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 Include a .nojekyll file in the branch.
-m MESG The commit message to use on the target branch.
-p Push the branch to origin/{branch} after committing.
-r REMOTE The name of the remote to push to. [origin]
-b BRANCH Name of the branch to write to. [gh-pages]
-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.
ghp-import also recognizes the GIT_DIR environment variable which can be
useful for Git hooks.
ghp-import is distributed under the Tumbolia Public License. See the LICENSE
file for more information.