0x02 travis + nikola

One has running Nikola. One stores all ones work on GitHub and hosts it on the GitHub Pages. Nice. But do I really need to push my changes to the repo, and when I'm ready, build static pages and push them to the master. And what if I'm not at my computer, what if I must change some typo. It would be nice if something could do this build and deploy the stuff for me.

That is why I invite...

Travis CI

What one needs to have to proceed? Travis account connected to the GitHub account. Choose repository with your site and change some settings. I checked Build only if .travis.yml is present, Build pushed branches and Build pushed pull requests.

As the 'checkbox' says Travis will build only if .travis.yml is present. So add it to the repo! Travis should do 2 things: build static files and deploy them to master. The first part should look like:

language: python
cache: apt
sudo: false
addons:
  apt:
    packages:
    - language-pack-en-base
python:
- 3.6.5
branches:
  except:
  - master
install:
- pip install 'Nikola[extras]'==8.0.0.b2
script:
- nikola build 

First 9 lines: Nikola is written in python, it is why we need it in, at least, version 3. Travis should ignore any changes on master branch (he will do them himself after all), that's the reason for excepting branch master. First, we have to install Nikola using pip. I forced version 8.0.0.b2 for its built-in theme. By default, pip installs version 7 of Nikola. After all this 'work' there is time for build script: nikola build.

Ok, so now we have our site build. How deploy it on GitHub Pages? One could play with nikola deploy or a few git commands, but Travis has a deploy provider for that:

deploy:
    provider: pages
    skip-cleanup: true
    keep-history: true
    github-token: $GITHUB_TOKEN
    local-dir: output
    target-branch: master
    verbose: true
    repo: death-of-rats/death-of-rats.github.io
    on:
        branch: source

More information could be found at TCI01. I added local-dir to set what should be deployed and where (repo and target-branch: master). This operation should take place on source branch.

In GitHub Settings > Developer settings > Personal access tokens Generate new token for Travis. At GH01 you can read what to do. This token insert in Travis settings Environment Variables and use it by $VariableName.

Ok, now is the time to push changes and watch how Travis is building and deploying Your site.

Easy, I almost forget about that 4 hours of tries...

...SQUEAK!