Provide instructions on publishing GH Pages

[gaearon]

This continues #94 and integrates it into the tool more tightly.
By default, you see this after npm run build:

However, if you specify homepage in package.json, you will see something like this instead:

Maybe we can even detect the host in the future by URL and offer other sequences of commands without necessarily embedding them into the tool. The user can always copy and paste them into a custom script, if they want to. This way it’s super easy to keep deploy customizable without adding flags to the tool.

[dhruska]

I think we have a path issue here - it is looking for package.json in my user directory. Maybe something like path.resolve(__dirname, relative, '..', 'package.json')?

[gaearon]

Can you send a PR? I already merged the other one.

[dhruska]

Yep will do!

[gaearon]

This is weird though, relative should be correct here.

[gaearon]

Never mind, I'll fix it in this PR.

[dhruska]

Sounds good - thanks!

[gaearon]

Paths should be fixed now, opened #163 to investigate why e2e didn't fail. (If you'd like, take a look please.)

[dhruska]

Sounds good, will check it out

[clouless]

thx for fixing this.
any idea when a new version will be released to npmjs containing this fix?

[gaearon]

Within a week.

[selfup]

Not sure it is required to git push origin :gh-pages prior to the subtree command

The subtree command only pushes the build folder to the branch even if it doesn't exist.

Otherwise, awesome work!

[gaearon]

I had errors using subtree push when the branch existed.

[selfup]

Oh interesting. Thanks for clearing that up!

[rafgraph]

This is great, but if you add a router it doesn't work because GitHub Pages doesn't natively support single page apps with frontend routing (unless it's the ugly hashtag kind). It might be good for the docs to mention this. There is a simple workaround for this by adding a 404.html file with a redirect script, see Single Page Apps for GitHub Pages.

[gaearon]

if you add a router it doesn't work because GitHub Pages doesn't natively support single page apps with frontend routing

That’s the tradeoff, yes. PRs to docs are super welcome.

It might be good for the docs to mention this. There is a simple workaround for this by adding a 404.html file with a redirect script, see Single Page Apps for GitHub Pages.

OMG, that’s such a cool approach. We should definitely link to that.

[gaearon]

Actually I think we should detect if your homepage field contains github.io, and if so, just embed that piece as part of HtmlWebpackPlugin processing, and emit an additional 404.html. Would you like to work on this?

[selfup]

@gaearon

Only problem with that is that a good amount of people have custom domains pointed to their username.github.io.

Wonder if there needs to be another field in the JSON? Like: "gh-pages": true or something.

Otherwise, @RAFREX that custom 404.html with the redirect script is really nice!

[rafgraph]

Just made a PR to add a note about the router to the template readme (love the "contribute some" link, made it super easy).

I think there would need to be some sort of flag, like "gh-pages": true because of custom domains. Also, if it's a project pages site it must use a custom domain in order GitHub Pages to serve the custom 404.html file (if it's a user or organization pages site, then a custom domain is not required).

[gaearon]

Let’s stick with just the doc notice then for now.

[rafgraph]

Okay, sounds good.

[chibicode]

@domenic has also written a gist explaining how to deploy automatically using Travis (seems to have some problem, so please see its comments)
https://gist.github.com/domenic/ec8b0fc8ab45f39403dd

Also this might be useful:
https://github.com/blog/2228-simpler-github-pages-publishing