GitHub Pages Deployment

This page documents deployments using dpl v1 which currently is the default version. The next major version dpl v2 will be released soon, and we recommend starting to use it. Please see our blog post for details. dpl v2 documentation can be found here.

Deploying to GitHub Pages uses git push --force to overwrite the history on the target branch, so make sure you only deploy to a branch used for that specific purpose, such as gh-pages. It is possible to disable this “force push” behavior by setting keep_history option to true.

Travis CI can deploy your static files to GitHub Pages after a successful build.

You will need to provide a personal access token and set the deployment provider details in .travis.yml.

For a minimal configuration, add the following to your .travis.yml:

deploy:
  provider: pages
  skip_cleanup: true
  github_token: $GITHUB_TOKEN  # Set in the settings page of your repository, as a secure variable
  keep_history: true
  on:
    branch: main

Make sure you have skip_cleanup set to true, otherwise Travis CI will delete all the files created during the build, which will probably delete what you are trying to upload.

Setting the GitHub token #

You’ll need to generate a personal access token with the public_repo or repo scope (repo is required for private repositories). Since the token should be private, you’ll want to pass it to Travis securely in your repository settings or via encrypted variables in .travis.yml.

Further configuration #

  • local_dir: Directory to push to GitHub Pages, defaults to current directory. Can be specified as an absolute path or a relative path from the current directory.
  • repo: Repo slug, defaults to current repo. Note: The slug consists of username and repo name and is formatted like user/repo-name.
  • target_branch: Branch to (force, see: keep_history) push local_dir contents to, defaults to gh-pages.
  • keep_history: Optional, create incremental commit instead of doing push force, defaults to false.
  • fqdn: Optional, sets a custom domain for your website, defaults to no custom domain support.
  • project_name: Defaults to value of fqdn or repo slug, used for metadata.
  • email: Optional, committer info, defaults to deploy@travis-ci.org.
  • name: Optional, committer, defaults to Deployment Bot.
  • committer_from_gh: Optional, defaults to false. Allows you to use the token’s owner name and email for commit. Overrides email and name options.
  • allow_empty_commit: Optional, defaults to false. Enabled if only keep_history is true.
  • github_url: Optional, the URL of the self-hosted GitHub enterprise, defaults to github.com.
  • verbose: Optional, be verbose about internal steps, defaults to false.
  • deployment_file: Optional, defaults to false, enables creation of deployment-info files.