Pushing Documentation to Github Pages

.gitignore

# ignore built md and html files in the slides directory
slides/*.html
slides/*.md
slides/fig/*
slides/figures/*

citation.md

Reference: http://ricostacruz.com/lidoc/manual/guides/uploading_to_github_pages.html

deploy.sh

# Makefile
GITHUB_REPO ?= yourname/project

# Sends the documentation to gh-pages.
docs.deploy: docs
  cd docs && \
  git init . && \
  git add . && \
  git commit -m "Update documentation."; \
  git push "git@github.com:$(GITHUB_REPO).git" master:gh-pages --force && \
  rm -rf .git

.PHONY: docs.deploy

I think this makefile finally clarifies what I had been suspecting all along about how to deploy generated files to github without committing it to the repo. Here is what the makefile does.

1. Change to the docs directory.
2. Initialize a git repo.
3. Add all files to the repo.
4. Commit files to the repo.
5. Push master branch to remote gh-pages forcefully.
6. Remove the .git direcotry

I can put all generated files in .gitignore. Some prime candidates are the fig or figure directory in which knitr generated figures are stored.

I tried this and it works. Basically it works by initializing the deploy directory as a git repository, pushing it to a remote gh-pages branch (by force) and removing the .git directory so that all history is erased.