Publishing a website using Octopress and GitHub Pages from a new computer

OK, I admit, this post is very specific and it serves more so that I will never again forget how to do this.

This blog is hosted on GitHub Pages and is done only with HTML, no CMS is behind it. But I use Octopress to generate HTML files for me.

Everything works great, and this post is not about how to use nor Octopress or GitHub pages, their documentation is very clear and not many steps are needed to have a website on GitHub pages for free.

Anyway, when you publish a site on GitHub pages, the code is hosted on GitHub and visible in the master branch and the generated and processed pages are in a branch called gh-pages.

The problem

Everything worked perfectly until I had to make a clone of the repository on another machine (since I’ve changed my computer) and had to publish an update to the site.

These are the steps that were performed:

git clone git@github.com:usuario/repositorio.git

bundle install #to install the ruby dependencies

rake setup_github_pages

The above command creates the directory _deploy and also a local branch gh-pages.

After I’ve done my changes I tried to deploy:

rake gen_deploy

And I received the following error:

! [rejected]     gh-pages -> gh-pages (non-fast-forward)

And it also said that the repository has not been updated.

The solution

After much searching, and because a git pull has not solved the problem, I decided to do a force push to deploy it.

For that, I opened the Rakefile file and edited the push task. Where it was:

system "git push origin #{deploy_branch}"

I changed to:

system "git push origin +#{deploy_branch}"

Note the + sign there, it will make a force push and solve the problem. After a deployment using the force push, I went back to the task as it was before and everything started to work normally again.