Workflow for documentation pages

After quite a bit of trial and error, I have settled on a documentation workflow I’m happy with.

Setting up the repositories.

To start, you need to set up a documentation structure that forms a static html site. This could be a variety of things, such as asciidocotr, dOxygen, Sphynx, jekyll, etc.

Then make a directory structure so there is a folder for both the master and gh-pages branches of the code.

I found having seperate folders minimizes the chances of having merge conflicts.

So for example, you might have a repository that is called My_docs and in it are two subfolders master and gh-pages

For example:

$ pwd
home/Git_projects/My_docs/
$ ls
master gh-pages

Keep the source files in the master branch

In the master branch, keep the source files for the static website. For example, I keep all my asciidoctor source files in the master branch.

Build the website, and keep the website files in the gh-pages branch.

I use asciidoctor to build webistes, but the built website is not tracked in the master folder. Instead, when I build the website, I then copy the html and image files over to gh-pages and commit them ONLY to the gh-pages branch.

Making sure you don’t have conflicts.

To avoid conflicts, it is helpful to only have the gh-pages branch in the gh-pages folder, and I also find it useful to only have files needed for building the website in the gh-pages branch.

For the master branch, you just work as normal.

For the gh-pages branch you 1. Clone the master into the gh-pages branch 2. Check out the gh-pages branch

$ pwd
home/Git_projects/My_docs/gh-pages
$ git git checkout origin/gh-pages -b gh-pages
  1. Now delete the master branch in the gh-pages folder:
$ git branch -d master

This step is mainly to ensure that you don’t accidentally commit something to master while you are in the gh-pages directory. It is not needed but is a useful precaution. 4. Copy across html and index files every time you build the website.