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source/_posts/publishing-sculpin-sites-with-github-pages.md

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+---
+title: Publishing Sculpin Sites with GitHub Pages
+date: 2017-07-13
+excerpt: How I moved my website to GitHub pages.
+tags:
+    - github
+    - php
+    - sculpin
+meta:
+    image:
+      url: '/images/blog/jackson-octocat.png'
+      type: 'image/png'
+      height: 200
+      width: 451
+---
+
+<p class="text-center" markdown="1">![](/images/blog/jackson-octocat.png)</p>
+
+Earlier this week I moved this site from my personal Linode server to [GitHub
+Pages][0].
+
+This made sense as I already kept the source code in [on GitHub][1], the issue
+was that GitHub Pages doesn’t know how to dynamically parse and generate a
+Sculpin site like it does with some other static site generators. It can though
+parse and serve HTML files, which is what Sculpin generates. It’s just a case of
+how those files are added to GitHub.
+
+I’ve seen different implementations of this, mostly where the Sculpin code is on
+one branch, and the generated HTML code is on a separate `gh-pages` or `master`
+branch (depending on your repository name). I’m not fond of this approach as it
+means automatically checking out and merging branches which can get messy, and
+also it’s weird to look at a repo’s branches page and see one branch maybe tens
+or hundreds of commits both ahead and behind the default branch.
+
+This has been made simpler and tidier now that we can use a `docs` directory
+within the repository to serve content.
+
+<img src="/images/blog/github-pages.png" alt="" class="is-centered"
+style="margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px"
+
+>
+
+This means that I can simply re-generate the site after making changes and add
+it as an additional commit to my main branch with no need to switch branches or
+perform a merge.
+
+To simplify this, I’ve added a new [publish.sh script][3] into my repository to
+automate the sites. This is how it currently looks:
+
+```bash
+#!/usr/bin/env bash
+
+SITE_ENV="prod"
+
+# Remove the existing docs directory, build the site and create the new
+# docs directory.
+rm -rf ./docs
+vendor/bin/sculpin generate --no-interaction --clean --env=${SITE_ENV}
+touch output_${SITE_ENV}/.nojekyll
+mv output_${SITE_ENV} docs
+
+# Ensure the correct Git variables are used.
+git config --local user.name 'Oliver Davies'
+git config --local user.email oliver@oliverdavies.uk
+
+# Add, commit and push the changes.
+git add --all docs
+git commit -m 'Build.'
+git push origin HEAD
+```
+
+This begins by removing the deleting the existing `docs` directory and
+re-generating the site with the specified environment. Then I add a `.nojekyll`
+file and rename the output directory to replace `docs`.
+
+Now the changes can be added, committed and pushed. Once pushed, the new code is
+automatically served by GitHub Pages.
+
+## HTTPS
+
+GitHub Pages unfortunately does [not support HTTPS for custom domains][7].
+
+As the site was previously using HTTPS, I didn’t want to have to go back to
+HTTP, break any incoming links and lose any potential traffic. To continue using
+HTTPS, I decided to [use Cloudflare][6] to serve the site via their CDN which
+does allow for HTTPS traffic.
+
+## Next Steps
+
+- Enable automatically running `publish.sh` when new changes are pushed to
+  GitHub rather than running it manually. I was previously [using Jenkins][4]
+  and Fabric for this, though I’m also going to look into using Travis to
+  accomplish this.
+- Add the pre-build steps such as running `composer install` and `yarn` to
+  install dependencies, and `gulp` to create the front-end assets. This was
+  previously done by Jenkins in my previous setup.
+
+## Resources
+
+- [Publishing your GitHub Pages site from a /docs folder on your master
+  branch][2]
+- [Bypassing Jekyll on GitHub Pages][5]
+- [Secure and fast GitHub Pages with CloudFlare][6]
+
+[0]: https://pages.github.com
+[1]: https://github.com/opdavies/oliverdavies.uk
+[2]:
+  https://help.github.com/articles/configuring-a-publishing-source-for-github-pages/#publishing-your-github-pages-site-from-a-docs-folder-on-your-master-branch
+[3]: https://github.com/opdavies/oliverdavies.uk/blob/master/publish.sh
+[4]: /articles/2015/07/21/automating-sculpin-jenkins
+[5]: https://github.com/blog/572-bypassing-jekyll-on-github-pages
+[6]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/secure-and-fast-github-pages-with-cloudflare
+[7]: https://github.com/blog/2186-https-for-github-pages