Pushing your Custom Jekyll build to GH-Pages
I spent an hour or two trying to find a good script on how to push custom Jekyll builds to Github Pages. Surprisingly, they don’t allow you to target a specific folder for the build and keep just one branch. (Outside of /docs, but I couldn’t find a way to build Jekyll in /docs) - There was some complicated ways to setup Github Actions or other one-off solutions to build to a new branch. However, I finally found a solution that works for me, and I’ve compiled it here for my own reference and maybe it’ll help you!
Setup
site is your build folder.
gh-pages can be any other branch if you have a different name or need.
$ rm -rf _site
$ echo "_site/" >> .gitignore
$ git worktree add dist gh-pages
Script
Create a new file called push-to-gh-pages.sh.
jekyll build # This can be whatever your build command is
cd _site
git add --all
git commit -m "Build at `date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`"
git push origin gh-pages --force
cd ..
Give it Execute permission:
$ chmod +x push-to-gh-pages.sh
Putting it all together
Once you have all that set up, you can make any changes you need in your repo, then after completing your work, you can make ./push-to-gh-pages.sh part of your deploy process and see changes on your *.github.io site!