RyanHedges.com

This is a middlemann website that compiles into static web pages to be hosted on github pages.

Some tips for doing something similar yourself.

Building to master branch

Since this site is utilizing Githubs user pages I needed to find a way to work incrementally and only deploy my code when something was finished. The other aspect of this was that the static site gets exported into a build directory(bottom of page).

To accomplish this I did several things.

• Changed your default branch from master to a new development branch. I named mine source.

$ git branch source
$ git push -u origin source

• In your /Gemfile add middleman-deploy. I decided on this one because it seems to be the most maintained over other gems as well as great documentation.

# helps deploy to master branch
gem 'middleman-deploy', '~> 0.3.0'

• Configure your middleman-deploy gem by adding the activate block to your config.rb file. .branch will be set to master so that github pages will use those built files for displaying my website.

activate :deploy do |deploy|
 deploy.method = :git
 deploy.branch = 'master'
 deploy.commit_message = 'initial build for middleman conversion'
end

Please note, I plan on changing the commit_message with most deploys as I'd like to make my builds descriptive. You can omit this if you want to have the default message commit message made for you.

How to build a new version of your site

It's rather simple to build the changes to your site thanks to the middleman-deploy gem. In your terminal type:

$ middleman deploy --build-before

I decided to use the --build-before option so that it's one step to essentially push my changes to my master branch.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments you can reach me at: ryan@ryanhedges.com