Trigger GitHub Pages Rebuild with API Call.md

You can trigger a GitHub Pages (Jekyll) rebuild with a single API call. This is pretty useful for auto-publishing blog posts from a bot like Zapier in conjunction with future: false in your Jekyll config.yml. Just future-date your posts, and they'll go live when that date rolls around. I use a version of this setup for my blog at greghaskins.com.

Setup

1. Create a GitHub personal access token and save it somewhere. It needs to have the repo access scope (at least).

2. Create a file at the root of your repo (e.g. .publish) with some dummy content.

   $ echo ".publish" > .publish

3. Commit it and push.

   $ git add .publish
   $ git commit -m "add .publish file for scripted publishing"
   ...
   $ git push

4. Get the blob SHA and base64 content for it via the GitHub API

   $ curl -H "Authorization: token $YOUR_TOKEN" \
   > https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo/contents/.publish
   {
     "name": ".publish",
     "path": ".publish",
     "sha": "3f949857e8ed4cb106f9744e40b638a7aabf647f",
     ...
     "type": "file",
     "content": "LnB1Ymxpc2gK\n",
     "encoding": "base64",
     ...
   }

In this case it's 3f949857e8ed4cb106f9744e40b638a7aabf647f and LnB1Ymxpc2gK (strip the trailing \n).

And you're all set.

Triggering a rebuild/publish

Just "update" the content for that .publish file with the same content as before. This creates a new commit on the GitHub side and triggers a Pages rebuild.

$ curl -H "Authorization: token $YOUR_TOKEN" \
> -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8" \
> -X PUT \
> -d '{"message": "re-publish GitHub Pages",
>   "committer": {
>     "name": "PublishBot",
>     "email": "publishbot@example.com"
>   },
>   "content": "LnB1Ymxpc2gK",
>   "sha": "3f949857e8ed4cb106f9744e40b638a7aabf647f"}' \
>   https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo/contents/.publish

{
  "content": {
    "name": ".publish",
    "path": ".publish",
    "sha": "3f949857e8ed4cb106f9744e40b638a7aabf647f",
    ...
  },
  "commit": {
    "sha": "57af635acad5802c0f5a166f431e4ad19db1e80f",
    "message": "re-publish GitHub Pages",
    ...
  }
}

You'll notice that the SHA before and after is the same. That means you can simply replay this same request any time you want to trigger a rebuild.

Does this method still work?

I can verify that this still works just fine.