Build into gh-pages branch from master branch

Question

What I want to do: I am using github. I have two branches. Master and gh-pages. I have a unity3d project on my master branch. When I run it, it will generate a webpage. I want to display the contents of the webpage on the gh-pages branch.

I assume this means I have to share a folder between two branches of my repository. That seems nearly impossible.

Is there a right way to do this? My current solution is making two github projects and building from the first into the second. Then, I view the gh-page for the second. That seems very... extraneous. I should be able to do this all with one project.

Answer 1

You can just clone your repository again within your working directory structure of the first repository. So locally, you have this folder structure:

project
|- .git/
|- .gitignore
|- (other project related files)
|- deploy/
   |- .git/
   |- (deployed files)

Both project and deploy are cloned repositories of your project; deploy has the gh-pages branch checked out. The outer .gitignore obviously lists deploy/, so the folder is ignored for the project.

Now, when deploying, you publish all the files into the deploy folder, then cd into it, do a git add ., git commit, git push and the generated files are deployed.

Obviously this will not give you an actual relation between your master and the gh-pages branch, but both will live completely independent of each other in the same repository.

Answer 2

This is similar to the Jekyll workflow. Say unity3d content is generated into a folder called foo. Add foo to .gitignore then do this

git checkout master
<run unity3d>
git checkout gh-pages
git rm -qr .
cp -r foo/. .
rm -r foo
git add
git commit

Example