Github: Mirroring gh-pages to master
I'm developing a jQuery plugin that's being hosting on GitHub. It has a demo included of which I'm manually copying and pushing to the branch gh-pages
, what I'd like to do is have it so when I push a change to master
it is automatically pushed to gh-pages
, or at least a setup where they are mirrored.
I've already seen this question but not sure if it really answers my question with regard to these requirements:
- I use Tower, I don't mind using the terminal (Mac) to make changes to config, so long as the solution works with this GUI.
- I only want this 'mirroring' on certain repos, not on all of them on my machine.
Cheers
Solution 1:
Add the following 2 lines to the [remote "origin"]
section of .git/config
:
push = +refs/heads/master:refs/heads/gh-pages
push = +refs/heads/master:refs/heads/master
Every time you push
it will automatically push master to gh-pages as well.
I'm using this for the jQuery Lifestream project.
Solution 2:
git checkout gh-pages
git merge master
git push origin gh-pages
Solution 3:
Do not do what denbuzze suggests above!! The + (plus sign) in the push makes it quietly accept non-fastforward updates. I found out the hard way that this can irrevocably cause work to be lost by leading to dangling commits. Simply removing the plus signs makes this a safer approach.
push = refs/heads/master:refs/heads/gh-pages
push = refs/heads/master:refs/heads/master
now instead of causing a force update this will cause a warning & pull suggestion
To https://github.com/someuser/repo.git
! [rejected] master -> gh-pages (fetch first)
! [rejected] master -> master (fetch first)
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://github.com/someuser/repo.git'
hint: Updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do
hint: not have locally. This is usually caused by another repository pushing
hint: to the same ref. You may want to first integrate the remote changes
hint: (e.g., 'git pull ...') before pushing again.
hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' in 'git push --help' for details.
Solution 4:
I'm adding further explanation to @denbuzze and @MCSDWVL answers.
If you want to push both to master
and gh-pages
automatically each time you run git push origin
, you probably want to add a Refspec to the git config of your repo.
So, according to the git-scm book, you can add two RefSpecs, by adding two push
values to the repo config file .git/config
:
[remote "origin"]
url = https://github.com/<github_user>/<repo_name>
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
push = refs/heads/master:refs/heads/master
push = refs/heads/master:refs/heads/gh-pages
That will cause a git push origin
to:
- Push the local
master
branch to the remotemaster
branch - Push the local
master
branch to the remotegh-pages
branch
by default.
Note: using a +
before the spec causes to force push to the repo. Use it with caution:
The format of the refspec is an optional
+
, followed by<src>:<dst>
, where<src>
is the pattern for references on the remote side and<dst>
is where those references will be written locally. The+
tells Git to update the reference even if it isn’t a fast-forward.
Solution 5:
I personally like to wrap this in an alias:
alias gpogh="git checkout gh-pages && git merge master && git push origin gh-pages && git checkout -"
This mirrors your master to gh-pages
, pushes to github, then switches back the previous branch you were working on.