Deploying Jekyll on shared hosting

Recently I have been wanting to have the following:

• a Jekyll site,
• with source hosted on GitHub,
• which uses Jekyll plugins (this rules out GitHub Pages).
• which also is served with HTTPS (which also rules out GitHub Pages, as far as I know),
• that is automatically built after each push to GitHub,
• and then deployed on a shared hosting server.

After some Googling, this doesn’t appear like a very common thing to do. Maybe it’s that most people who would use Jekyll stay far, far away from shared hosting. From my experience this seems like a very sensible thing to do. Unfortunately I’m stuck with it for now.

Anyway, I hacked together a solution recently and felt like sharing.

• A Ruby application (“site-builder”) runs on Heroku and listens for webhooks from GitHub, which are delivered after each push.
• On receiving a push, it will clone the site repository, build the site, create a gzipped tar archive of all its content, and then POST it to a configured URL on the shared hosting server.
• A Perl CGI script on the shared hosting server (“upload-site”) receives the archive and unpacks it into your public_html directory.

If this might be useful for you, feel free to use one or both of these:

• https://github.com/eums/site-builder
• https://github.com/eums/upload-site

NB: I have only tested this on one shared hosting provider (Namecheap). This might break your stuff. If that happens I will not accept any responsibility. Notably, the current behaviour for upload-site is to delete everything in the public_html directory before copying the new content over, so please be aware of that.

I don't host comments on my blog, but if you have thoughts or questions, you can let me know on Twitter: @hdgarrood