GitHub Pages Import

As part of [gunicorn][gunicorn], [Benoit Chesneau][benoit] and I have been starting to look at how to host documentation. There’s the obvious method of using [GitHub’s post-receive hook][github-post] to trigger doc builds and rsync to a webserver, but we ended up wanting to try out github’s hosting to make the whole interface a bit more robust.

[GitHub Pages][gh-pages] is a pretty awesome service that GitHub provides for hosting project documentation. The only thing is that it requires a gh-pages branch that is the site’s document root. This means that keeping documentation sources in the branch with code is a bit difficult. And it really turns into a head scratcher for things like [Sphinx][sphinx] that want to access documentation sources and code sources at the same time.

Then I stumbled across an interesting looking package called [github-tools][github-tools] that looked almost like what I wanted. It was a tad complicated and more involved than I wanted but it gave me an idear. Why not just write a script that can copy a directory to the gh-pages branch of the repository. This saves me from even having to think about the branch and everything becomes magical.

This is what ghp-import was written for.

[gunicorn]: http://www.gunicorn.com/ “Gunicorn” [benoit]: http://github.com/benoitc “Benoît Chesneau” [github-post]: https://help.github.com/articles/post-receive-hooks “GitHub Post-Receive Hook” [gh-pages]: http://pages.github.com/ “GitHub Pages” [sphinx]: http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ “Sphinx Documentation” [github-tools]: http://dinoboff.github.com/github-tools/ “github-tools”