What is gh-pages?
The gh-pages npm package is a utility for deploying projects to GitHub Pages. It simplifies the process of publishing content to a GitHub repository's gh-pages branch, which is used to serve static sites directly from the repository.
What are gh-pages's main functionalities?
Deploying to GitHub Pages
This feature allows you to deploy the contents of a directory (in this case, 'dist') to the gh-pages branch of your repository. The callback function handles any errors that occur during the deployment process.
const ghpages = require('gh-pages');
ghpages.publish('dist', function(err) {
if (err) {
console.error('Deployment failed:', err);
} else {
console.log('Deployment successful!');
}
});
Customizing Deployment
This feature allows you to customize the deployment by specifying options such as the branch to deploy to, the repository URL, and user information for the commit.
const ghpages = require('gh-pages');
ghpages.publish('dist', {
branch: 'custom-branch',
repo: 'https://github.com/user/repo.git',
user: {
name: 'Your Name',
email: 'your-email@example.com'
}
}, function(err) {
if (err) {
console.error('Deployment failed:', err);
} else {
console.log('Deployment successful!');
}
});
Cleaning Up Before Deployment
This feature allows you to clean up the local cache before deploying. This can be useful to ensure that no old files are left over from previous deployments.
const ghpages = require('gh-pages');
ghpages.clean();
ghpages.publish('dist', function(err) {
if (err) {
console.error('Deployment failed:', err);
} else {
console.log('Deployment successful!');
}
});
Other packages similar to gh-pages
netlify-cli
Netlify CLI is a command-line tool for interacting with Netlify's platform. It allows you to deploy sites, manage DNS settings, and more. Unlike gh-pages, which is specific to GitHub Pages, Netlify CLI provides a broader range of functionalities for deploying and managing static sites on Netlify.
surge
Surge is a simple command-line tool for publishing static sites. It offers a straightforward way to deploy sites to Surge's hosting service. While gh-pages is specific to GitHub Pages, Surge provides an alternative hosting solution with its own set of features and simplicity.
vercel
Vercel CLI is a command-line tool for deploying projects to Vercel's platform. It supports a wide range of frameworks and static site generators. Compared to gh-pages, Vercel CLI offers more advanced features such as serverless functions and automatic scaling.
gh-pages
Publish files to a gh-pages
branch on GitHub (or any other branch anywhere else).
This will evolve into a more useful package. For now, it just some extracted bits from the grunt-gh-pages
package.