docusaurus/docs/getting-started-publishing.md

id	title
publishing	Publishing your site

You should now have a site up and running locally. Once you have customized it to your liking, it's time to publish it. Docusaurus generates a static HTML website that is ready to be served by your favorite web server or online hosting solution.

Building Static HTML Pages

To create a static build of your website, run the following script from the website directory:

yarn run build # or `npm run build`

This will generate a build folder inside the website directory containing the .html files from all of your docs and other pages included in pages.

Hosting Static HTML Pages

At this point, you can grab all of the files inside the website/build folder and copy them over to your favorite web server's "html" directory.

For example, both Apache and nginx serve content from /var/www/html by default. That said, choosing a web server or provider is outside the scope of Docusaurus.

Using GitHub Pages

While choosing a web server or host is outside Docusaurus' scope, Docusaurus was designed to work really well with one of the most popular hosting solutions for open source projects: GitHub Pages.

Deploying your Docusaurus site to GitHub Pages is straightforward if you are already using GitHub to host your project. Your code repository does not even need to be public.

Even if your repo is private, anything published to a gh-pages branch will be public.

Most of the work to publish to GitHub pages is done for you automatically through the publish-gh-pages script. You just need to determine the values for a few parameters required by the script.

Two of the required parameters are set in the siteConfig.js:

• organizationName: The GitHub user or organization that owns the repository. In the case of Docusaurus, that would be the "facebook" GitHub organization.
• projectName: The name of the GitHub repository for your project. For example, Docusaurus is hosted at https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus, so our project name in this case would be "docusaurus".

Docusaurus also supports deploying user or organization sites. These sites will be served from the master branch of the repo. So, you will want to have the Docusaurus infra, your docs, etc. in another branch (e.g., maybe call it source). To do this, just set projectName to "username.github.io" (where username is your username or organization name on GitHub) and organizationName to "username". The publish script will automatically deploy your site to the root of the master branch to be served.

While we recommend setting the projectName and organizationName in siteConfig.js, you can also use environment variables ORGANIZATION_NAME and PROJECT_NAME.

One of the required parameters is set as a environment variable:

• GIT_USER: The username for a GitHub account that has commit access to this repo. For your own repositories, this will usually be your own GitHub username.

There are also two optional parameters that are set as environment variables:

• USE_SSH: If this is set to true, then SSH is used instead of HTTPS for the connection to the GitHub repo. HTTPS is the default if this variable is not set.

• CURRENT_BRANCH: The branch that contains the latest docs changes that will be deployed. Usually, the branch will be master, but it could be any branch (default or otherwise) except for gh-pages. If nothing is set for this variable, then the current branch will be used.

Once you have the parameter value information, you can go ahead and run the publish script, ensuring you have inserted your own values inside the various parameter placeholders:

To run the script directly from the command-line, you can use the following, filling in the parameter values as appropriate.

GIT_USER=<GIT_USER> \
  CURRENT_BRANCH=master \
  USE_SSH=true \
  yarn run publish-gh-pages # or `npm run publish-gh-pages`

The specified GIT_USER must have push access to the repository specified in the combination of organizationName and projectName.

You should now be able to load your website by visiting its GitHub Pages URL, which could be something along the lines of https://username.github.io/projectName, or a custom domain if you have set that up. For example, Docusaurus' own GitHub Pages URL is https://docusaurus.io (it can also be accessed via https://docusaurus.io/), because it is served from the gh-pages branch of the https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus GitHub repo. We highly encourage reading through the GitHub Pages documentation to learn more about how this hosting solution works.

You can run the command above any time you update the docs and wish to deploy the changes to your site. Running the script manually may be fine for sites where the documentation rarely changes and it is not too much of an inconvenience to remember to manually deploy changes.

However, you can automate the publishing process with continuous integration (CI).

Automating Deployments Using Continuous Integration

Continuous integration (CI) services are typically used to perform routine tasks whenever new commits are checked in to source control. These tasks can be any combination of running unit tests and integration tests, automating builds, publishing packages to NPM, and yes, deploying changes to your website. All you need to do to automate deployment of your website is to invoke the publish-gh-pages script whenever your docs get updated. In the following section we'll be covering how to do just that using Circle CI, a popular continuous integration service provider.

Using Circle CI

If you're already using Circle CI for your project, all you need to do to enable automatic deployments is to configure Circle to run the publish-gh-pages script as part of the deployment step.

1. Ensure the GitHub account that will be set as the GIT_USER has write access to the repo that contains the documentation, by checking Settings | Collaborators & teams in the repo.
2. Log into GitHub as the GIT_USER.
3. Go to https://github.com/settings/tokens for the GIT_USER and generate a new personal access token, granting it full control of private repositories through the repo access scope. Store this token in a safe place, making sure to not share it with anyone. This token can be used to authenticate GitHub actions on your behalf in place of your GitHub password.
4. Open your Circle CI dashboard, and navigate to the Settings page for your repository, then select "Environment variables". The URL looks like https://circleci.com/gh/ORG/REPO/edit#env-vars, where "ORG/REPO" should be replaced with your own GitHub org/repo.
5. Create a new environment variable named "GITHUB_TOKEN", using your newly generated access token as the value.
6. Open your circle.yml file and add the following under the machine: section to tell Circle to use relatively recent versions of node and npm, replacing npm with yarn if applicable:

machine:
  node:
    version: 6.11.2
  npm:
    version: 3.10.10

1. Then, add the following lines to the deployment: section. If you don't have a deployment: section, you can add it at the end of the file.

deployment:
  website:
    branch: master
    commands:
      - git config --global user.email "<GITHUB_USERNAME>@users.noreply.github.com"
      - git config --global user.name "<YOUR_NAME>"
      - echo "machine github.com login <GITHUB_USERNAME> password $GITHUB_TOKEN" > ~/.netrc
      - cd website && npm install && GIT_USER=<GIT_USER> npm run publish-gh-pages

Make sure to replace <GIT_USER> with the actual username of the GitHub account that will be used to publish the documentation.

DO NOT place the actual value of $GITHUB_TOKEN in circle.yml. We already configured that as an environment variable back in Step 3.

If you want to use SSH for your GitHub repo connection, you can set USE_SSH=true. So the above command would look something like: cd website && npm install && GIT_USER=<GIT_USER> USE_SSH=true npm run publish-gh-pages.

Unlike when you run the publish-gh-pages script manually, when the script runs within the Circle environment, the value of CURRENT_BRANCH is already defined as an environment variable within CircleCI and will be picked up by the script automatically.

Now, whenever a new commit lands in master, CircleCI will run your suite of tests and, if everything passes, your website will be deployed via the publish-gh-pages script.

If you would rather use a deploy key instead of a personal access token, you can by starting with the Circle CI instructions for adding a read/write deploy key.

Tips & Tricks

When initially deploying to a gh-pages branch using Circle CI, you may notice that some jobs triggered by commits to the gh-pages branch fail to run successfully due to a lack of tests. You can easily work around this by creating a basic Circle CI config with the following contents:

# Circle CI 2.0 Config File
# This config file will prevent tests from being run on the gh-pages branch.
version: 2
jobs:
  build:
    machine: true
    branches:
      ignore: gh-pages
    steps:
      -run: echo "Skipping tests on gh-pages branch"

Save this file as config.yml and place it in a .circleci folder inside your website/assets folder.