How do I push jekyll _site directory to gh-pages branch, and leave the source in master?

Question

I have a basic jekyll site consisting of pages (not posts) but, because I wanted to sort the pages when I listed them, I had to use the Jekyll-Sort plugin (kinda weird sorting pages is not built in to jekyll).

Because I'm using a plugin, I can't leverage GitHub's auto jekylling. So I'd like to push the source code of the project to the master branch and just the _site directory to the gh-pages branch.

I can't figure out how to do this - I tried adding a git repo inside the _site directory to push that to gh-pages but every time I run jekyll it erases that entire directory and I lose the .git folder.

Any suggestions? Or a way to natively sort?

Answer 1

A less painful solution:

1. Checkout your branch, where your build-source is located (maybe src, or master)
2. (Optional: Add _site to your .gitconfig, so it get's ignored, if not already done)

3. Remove all content of the _site directory:

   $ rm -r _site/*

4. Clone your repo's gh-pages branch into the _site directory:

   $ git clone -b gh-pages `git config remote.origin.url` _site

Final steps: Just let jekyll build, do commit & push:

$ jekyll build,

cd into _site:

$ cd _site,

target all files for commit:

$ git add -A,

commit them:

git commit -am 'Yeah. Built from subdir'

and push your site to GitHub-Pages:

git push.