Metalsmith GitHub Pages Deployment Script

A shell deployment script for deploying metalsmith sites to GitHub pages.

Why

Metalsmith is awesome. Yorkshire Interactive has used it on 3 sites in just the past month. However, if you're wanting to deploy your static site you built with Metalsmith there's no clean way to do it as far as we could find. So, with a bit of hacking we came up with a deployment script.

How

The tl;dr of how the script works is that it builds your files, goes into the build directory, makes it a git repo, commits all the files and finally force pushes all those files to your gh-pages branch.

Setup

First of all, make sure you have ai git remote named origin that you have access to.

Next, this script assumes your build script is at the root and called build.js. If that isn't the case for you, just change the node build.js line to call your build script.

Once you have that the simplest way to run this is just copying the file to your project in the root and running it like ./deploy.sh.

Or, if you prefer your scripts going through npm you could do something like this which is what we do:

{
  "name": "A project",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "scripts": {
    "deploy": "./deploy.sh"
  },
  "author": "Yorkshire Interactive",
  "license": "MIT",
  "dependencies": {
    "metalsmith": "^2.1.0"
  }
}

This let's us call npm run deploy and it will kick off the script.

Contributing

We're still new to Metalsmith so if there's a better deployment script or you have ideas or comments about this one feel free to open a ticket or send a PR!

Roadmap

Below are options we want to add to it:

• Pass a git remote URL instead of it assuming origin
• Pass your build command
• Change your build path
• Set your project root path