Today we planned to host our website on github-pages as a static website. We decided to used ember web framework to develop this website. In case of organisation/user github pages, github reads the website source from the master branch not the gh-pages branch. This causes an issue: where to keep the ember specific code. As in ember the output code is in dist/ directory. Github needs the code inside the dist directory to be present in the root directory of the project. So the solution is:

  1. Create two branches:
    1. ember: For ember code
    2. master: For the final website code.
  2. ember will be your main branch. Do all the work there.
  3. Then do ember build --environment=production.
  4. Copy all the files in the /dist folder to the root of your master branch.
  5. Commit and push.

There is a ember-cli plugin which can do all these things for you: ember-cli-github-pages. But the readme of this plugin explains everything for Project github pages not for organisation github pages. But after spending some time I finally made it work for the organisation pages. Here are the steps:

  1. Create new emebr project ember new myBlog. Here myBlog is the name of the project.

  2. cd to myBlog and install ember-cli-github-pages:

    bash cd myBlog && ember install ember-cli-github-pages

  3. Remove the changes made to environment.js, as they are not required for Org/User pages

    bash git checkout -- config/environment.js

  4. Commit the changes:

    bash git add -A && git commit -m "Added ember-cli-github-pages addon https://github.com/poetic/ember-cli-github-pages"

  5. Create new branch named ember which will store all the ember related code: git checkout -b ember

  6. Run the following command as mentioned above:

    bash git checkout master && rm -rf `ls -a | grep -vE '\.gitignore|\.git|node_modules|bower_components|(^[.]{1,2}/?$)'` && git add -A && git commit -m "initialises gh-pages(in case of organisation master) commit"

  7. Switch back to ember branch:

    bash git checkout ember

  8. Build the site using ember-cli-github-pages:

    bash ember github-pages:commit --branch master --message "adds base site"

  9. Create new Org/User repo on Github and add the origin:

    bash git remote add origin https://github.com/knoxxs/knoxxs.github.io.git Here knoxxs is my username.

  10. Push the master branch:

    git push -u origin master
  11. Open http://knoxxs.github.io/.

I already made a pull request to include these steps in the plugin readme.

References

  1. ember-cli-github-pages