Update (02-07-2018): So it seems like the docs have been updated and a new way of publishing GitHub Pages through a /docs/ folder is available. I’ve gone with this approach instead, which puts the Hugo config and published content in the same repo, which may not be ideal, but hey, it’s better than what I had before.
New site, new technology to generate it, what could go wrong?! As it turns out, quite a bit.
I’m using Hugo to generate this site, and one thing I noticed from the docs on hosting on GitHub is that they don’t mention a way to store the Hugo config code. Only the generated site gets pushed to GitHub using a git submodule for the generated code. In the event of my computer crashing, I’d have to start from scratch on rebuilding my website.
One approach I thought of to save off my Hugo config was to store it on a different branch on the defaoite4.github.io repo, run Hugo with a new post or edits, switch back to master, commit the contents of the untracked public folder and push. Hint: it didn’t work. I’m sure I was doing something wrong since my commits were being rejected from GitHub.
! [rejected] master -> master (fetch first)
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:defaoite4/defaoite4.github.io.git'
hint: Updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do
hint: not have locally. This is usually caused by another repository pushing
hint: to the same ref. You may want to first integrate the remote changes
hint: (e.g., 'git pull ...') before pushing again.
hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' in 'git push --help' for details.
I imagine that this was due to pushing the config branch to GitHub first, then committing the public submodule afterwards. Anyway, the repo got into a weird state, so I followed the xkcd approach.
Next attempt was to use git submodule for the public generated site to push that to defaoite4.github.io and have this contained inside a new repo, site-hugo-config that would be pushed to a different location. I’m not that familiar with git submodules, but it proved a bit too difficult to learn at 11pm on a Thursday night. One thing I did note is that git doesn’t seem to like it when you add a submodule using SSH. It adds the submodule, but then doing a git status results in a weird error.
$ git status
fatal: Could not chdir to '../../../defaoite4.github.io': No such file or direct
fatal: 'git status --porcelain=2' failed in submodule public
Attempt #2 failed, let’s hope #3 succeeds! Abandoning the idea of submodules, I just decided to go with having two separate repos, one with the config that will generate the site, which will then be copied to the other repo, committed and pushed. Using a very short shell script, I managed to succeed at having a relatively easy path to updating my website. All I need to do is use Hugo to add new content and run the deploy script. Both repos get updated with the new content, and GitHub automatically publishes the content to my website.
Now, having two repos for basically the same content is probably definitely redundant, but it’s easier than the earlier options I tried out.