calex.org

NOTE: The methodology described below has been supplanted. Now I prefer to utilize Github + Azure Pipelines + Netlify to publish this blog. The post Github + Azure Pipelines + Netlify describes this methodology.

Today I figured out how to utilize Github + Travis CI + Netlify to publish this blog. It obviously depends on the amazing work by Yihui Xie on blogdown.

I plan to document this in greater detail in the future but wanted to at least stub out my approach / requirements.

• First, I wanted to have my master branch only contain the needed static files and Rmd files to produce my blog.
• I then take advantage of Travis and use it to render the html files from Rmd files using blogdown::build_site(local = FALSE, method = c("html", "custom"), run_hugo = FALSE). By setting run_hugo = FALSE I don’t utilize Hugo on Travis to build the final public directory.
• Next, I utilize a shell script to commit the just built html files to the publish branch.
• The publish branch gets force pushed back to Github.
• My Netlify account is setup to look for changes on the publish branch rather than the master branch within Github. Netlify utilizes Hugo to finish building and deploying my site.

I prefer this solution as it allows me to continue to utilize Netlify for publishing. I agree with Yihui that Netlify is a fantastic service and prefer using it over Github Pages. However, I was previously building all of my files — going from Rmd to html — on my local machine. I wanted the ability to utilize my phone or web browser to author a post and take advantage of all the various automation and CI tools to publish to the web.

Now when I want to write something, I usually start by copying a template file, adding my thoughts, removing draft from the YAML front matter, and then committing to master.

As an example I added this sentence via my phone. I have the beautiful Working Copy app on my phone which I can use to manage git repos. Alternatively I could just use the Github site from my phone or any web browser.