Automated Deployment: GitHub Pages (Deploy from branch)

The following contains general instructions on how to deploy to GitHub Pages from a branch.

See Automated Deployment: GitHub Pages (Actions) for instructions if you are using GitHub Actions.

note: you may want to use different tmp dirs:

git worktree add /tmp/book gh-pages
mdbook build
rm -rf /tmp/book/* # this won't delete the .git directory
cp -rp book/* /tmp/book/
cd /tmp/book
git add -A
git commit -m 'deploy new book'
git push origin gh-pages
cd -

Or put this into a Makefile rule:

.PHONY: deploy
deploy: book
    @echo "====> deploying to github"
    git worktree add /tmp/book gh-pages
    mdbook build
    rm -rf /tmp/book/*
    cp -rp book/* /tmp/book/
    cd /tmp/book && \
        git add -A && \
        git commit -m "deployed on $(shell date) by ${USER}" && \
        git push origin gh-pages

You may want to delete history on the gh-pages branch to avoid increasing the size of the repository significantly. To do that, the following command can be run before calling git add:

git update-ref -d refs/heads/gh-pages

This will also require adding the --force flag to git push.