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git remote add merger

GitHub has a great feature called GitHub Pages where they’ll vend your static files via http. It’s the best deal in town.

All you need to do is have a branch named gh-pages and perhaps push a button to engage the feature the first time you use it for a given repo.

Sometimes a project is nothing but a jumble of files that should be accessed via http, so having a master branch along with a gh-pages branch is just needless complexity.

Fortunately, it’s easy to create a Github project that consists solely of a gh-pages branch. No fuss, no master muss.

Here’s how I did it:

Create a new Github repository

Create a local repo:

mkdir JSRegexTeststand
cd JSRegexTeststand
git init
bbedit index.html
git add index.html
git ci -m 'initial commit'

Now we have a master branch hosting one commit. The trick is to rename master to gh-pages:

git branch -m master gh-pages

With our sneaky rename in place, we can push our lone branch to GitHub:

git remote add origin git@github.com:rentzsch/JSRegexTeststand.git
git push origin gh-pages

If all went as planned, your files should now be live at http://$username.github.com/$reponame/.

I noticed I didn’t have to manually click Admin -> GitHub Page: Generate Your Project Page link as mentioned in the documentation. I think GitHub now automatically generates your pages when upon receiving a gh-pages branch but they haven’t updated the docs yet.

At work, we use Subversion for source control. This is quite the popular VCS, but I’ve grown accustomed to (and much prefer) Git. Don’t get me wrong, SVN has its advantages, but since using Git my workflow has changed quite radically, and it’s difficult to revert to the rather inflexible and tedious SVN [...]