Question

I use Jekyll with a custom Coderay, so I have to maintain 2 branches on GitHub

master; The generated HTML site
source; Markdown files, etc

On the source branch I have a _includes folder that I ignore because it just contains some hard links. I have a script to manage the 2 branches but it seems like there should be something better than what I have come up with.

# Start on "source" branch
jekyll /tmp
git checkout master
git stash -u # _includes
rm -r * # keeps ".git"
cp -r /tmp/* .
git add -A
git commit
git push origin master
git checkout source
git stash apply

Answer 1

Option 1

The better option for me was to just get rid of the hard links altogether. I did this by making a plugin that allows to render a file outside of the repo.

render_partial.rb

module Jekyll
    class IncludeTag < Liquid::Tag
        def initialize(tag_name, file, tokens)
            super
            @file = file.strip
        end
        def render(context)
            File.read(@file)
        end
    end
end
Liquid::Template.register_tag('render_partial', Jekyll::IncludeTag)

Option 2

This option will work if you want to keep the hard links.

help.github.com/ignore-files

#!/bin/sh
# Initial setup, configure excludes
cat > .git/info/exclude <<EOF
_includes
_site
EOF
# Commit source branch
git checkout source
git add -A
git commit -m 'new post'
git push origin source
# Commit master branch
jekyll
git checkout master
git rm -r .
cp -r _site/* .
git add -A
git commit -m 'new post'
git push origin master