As part of gunicorn, me and Benoit Chesneau have been starting to look at how to host documentation. There's the obvious method of using GitHub's post-update hooks to trigger doc builds and rsync to a webserver, but we ended up wanting to try out github's hosting to make the whole interface a bit more robust.

GitHub Pages is a pretty awesome service that GitHub provides for hosting project documentation. The only thing is that it requires a gh-pages branch that is the site's document root. This means that keeping documentation sources in the branch with code is a bit difficult. And it really turns into a head scratcher for things like Sphinx that want to access documentation sources and code sources at the same time.

Then I stumbled across an interesting looking package called github-tools that looked almost like what I wanted. It was a tad complicated and more involved than I wanted but it gave me an idear. Why not just write a script that can copy a directory to the gh-pages branch of the repository. This saves me from even having to think about the branch and everything becomes magical.

This is what ghp-import was written for.

This will DESTROY your gh-pages branch. If you love it, you'll want to take backups before playing with this. This script assumes that gh-pages is 100% derivative. You should never edit files in your gh-pages branch by hand if you're using this script because you will lose your work.

Usage: ghp-import [OPTIONS] DIRECTORY

Options:
  -m MESG     The commit message to use on the gh-pages branch.
  -p          Push the branch to origin/gh-pages after committing.
  -r REMOTE   The name of the remote to push to. [origin]
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Its pretty simple. Inside your repository just run ghp-import $DOCS_DIR where $DOCS_DIR is the path to the built documentation. This will write a commit to your gh-pages branch with the current documents in it.

If you specify -p it will also attempt to push the gh-pages branch to GitHub. By default it'll just run git push origin gh-pages. You can specify a different remote using the -r flag.

ghp-import is distributed under the Tumbolia Public License. See the LICENSE file for more information.