Jekyll provides extension points via plugins. Allowing you to create custom content and enrich the document generation model.

Unfortunately if you’re deploying your site to Github pages these plugins aren’t supported. Specifically, Github generates your site using the --safe Jekyll configuration flag.

I found a couple of posts on how other people get around this; this one being the most helpful. However I couldn’t get any of them to work.

The standard approach appears to be to create a branch (say source) and then add a git submodule which references your remote master, making Jekyll generate your site to the submodule directory.

Jekyll, when generating your site, clobbers the _site/.git directory each time it generates the content. This means your git submodule is destroyed and seems to render the whole process void.

After a bit longer scouring the web I decided I’d just script up a process that would work for me based on the above submodule.

I was pretty fed up of being sidetracked at this point so I took the pragmatic approach and hacked together a rakefile to script my process. The full deploy to github phase goes as follows:

1. Clean all previously generated content (rm -rf ./_site2/)
2. Reset the git submodule (./_site2) to a clean state
3. Run Jekyll to generate the site, but configured to generate content to ./_site2/
4. Copy all generated content to the submodule (./_site)
5. Commit and push the submodule to github, publishing your generated site
6. Commit from the root of your project in your current branch (not master). This just ensures your submodule continues to point to the remote master

And here is the rakefile.