Deploying a static Jekyll site

I recently switched my Jekyll site from a Github pages repo to self-hosted on my DigitalOcean server (warning: referral link). The deployment process is not as easy, but I thought it would be a good learning experience.

I started with Capistrano, but found that I was writing too much script for something that really is quite simple:

• Accept a git push
• Build the new Jekyll site with changes

Two steps. It shouldn’t be too hard, right?

After fiddling around for an hour or so, I found a system that I like — a post-receive hook. Luckily, the Jekyll site has a template hook that works quite well:

{% gist 7282881 %}

Make sure it’s executable, and set up the right git remote:

git remote add production ssh://user@server.com/home/user/bare_repo

Once that’s setup, commit your changes and push to production (git push production master). If you’re seeing the echo lines, it’s working! Luckily it’ll also echo any error messages, so it should be fairly easy to debug.

One problem I ran into was the jekyll command not being available. This is because RVM isn’t loaded. My fix was to add a shebang to the post-receive:

#!/home/user/.rvm/bin/rvm-shell 2.0.0-p247