This post will probably end up being more useful to me than to anyone else who might stumble across the page. Here I’m going to document how I’ve set up my homepage, from a technical standpoint.
The content of the website is stored in a Git repository (found here). Most of the pages are originally written in Markdown. I use Jekyll to process the Markdown pages into a static website.
The Git repository contains a standard Jekyll layout:
Dated “posts” (such as blog entries) are placed in the _posts directory.
HTML layouts are placed in the _layouts directory.
All other content (CSS, images, other pages) lives wherever I please; that directory structure is reproduced on the live site.
One difference is that I include the _site directory in the Git repository; most people seem to include this directory in their .gitignore file so that it’s not tracked by Git. Doing so allows me to check out the repository and have a working copy of the site, without having to have Jekyll and its dependencies installed on that machine.
While I edit my pages, I keep a
jekyll --server --auto
instance running in the background, which allows me to view a local copy of the new website as I save changes.
For deployment, I have a (non-bare) clone of the Git repository on the Dreamhost machine that hosts my website. Once I have a change that I’m ready to deploy, I make a new Git commit and push it to the Dreamhost clone. Since I include the _site directory in my commits, this places the latest copy of the website onto the Dreamhost filesystem, ready to go.
Pushing doesn’t automatically update the checked-out HEAD on the remote system, however, so there’s an additional step needed. Once I’ve pushed the changes to Dreamhost, I run the following from the Dreamhost clone:
git reset --hard master
which updates the working copy on disk to be the same as the latest commit that I just pushed. At this point, the Dreamhost clone contains the latest copy of the site in its _site directory.
Dreamhost is expecting to serve my website out of a particular directory within my home directory; the final step is having this served directory be a symlink to the _site directory of the Dreamhost clone. Et voila!