Hexo with Github Pages

There are 3 steps to configuring the hexo static site generator to use a custom domain while hosting on Github Pages:

1. Create A Git Repo
2. Configure Hexo
3. Configure DNS

Lastly there’s some notes on how to use this setup.

Create A Git Repo

Create an empty repo named your-github-username.github.io on the Github site. Next, create a git repository to upload there:

[user@host ~]$ git init github-username.github.io
[user@host ~]$ cd github-username.github.io
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ touch .gitignore
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git add .gitignore
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git commit 'Initial Commit'
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git remote add origin ssh://git@github.com:Your-Github-Username/your-github-username.github.io.git

There will be 2 branches in the repo:

• master: hosts your generated static html / css etc.
• blog-setup: the name of this branch is unimportant, but it is an orphan branch and exists in parallel to master. The two are never merged. All your commits will be on this branch.

Step by step:

[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git checkout --orphan blog-setup
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git rm -rf *
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ cat - > .gitignore <<EOF
.DS_Store
Thumbs.db
db.json
*.log
node_modules/
public/
.deploy*/
EOF
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git add .gitignore
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git commit -m 'Initial commit of blog setup branch'
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git push -u origin blog-setup

Configure Hexo

First i installed hexo and created a site:

[user@host github-username.github.io]$ npm install hexo -g
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ hexo init
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ npm install
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ hexo server
INFO  Hexo is running at http://0.0.0.0:4000/. Press Ctrl+C to stop.

Visiting the URL in your browser will show the default page. Next i installed a theme i liked from the wiki themes list. I merged the theme repository as a subtree in git since in practice git submodules (the suggested method) can be quite clunky. The Github Page on this topic is a good reference.

[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git remote add -f alex https://github.com/ppoffice/hexo-theme-alex.git
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git merge -s ours --no-commit alex/master
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git read-tree --prefix=themes/alex -u alex/master
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ cat - >> _config.yml <<EOF
theme: alex

# Overridable Alex theme setting defaults from themes/alex/_config.yml
theme_config:

# Header
menu:
    Home: /
    Archives: /archives
    About: /about/index.html
rss: 
github: https://github.com/ppoffice/hexo-theme-alex

# Content
excerpt_link: Read More
fancybox: true

# Sidebar
sidebar: left
widgets:
- category
- archive
- recent_posts
- tag
- tagcloud
- links

# Links
links: 
    Hexo: http://hexo.io

# Miscellaneous
google_analytics:
favicon: /favicon.png
twitter:
google_plus:
fb_admins:
fb_app_id:
EOF
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git commit -m 'Import alex theme'

Next i made the site deployable to github pages. I already have an SSH key trusted by github so i will deploy my git repo by SSH.

[user@host github-username.github.io]$ npm install hexo-deployer-git --save
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ cat - >> _config.yml <<EOF
deploy:
type: git
repo: ssh://git@github.com/Your-Github-Username/your-github-username.github.io
branch: master
EOF

Configure DNS

Firstly, Github Pages requires that we publish a file called CNAME to the root of our repository (master branch). Since hexo performs a force push to that location, if we simply added the CNAME file it would be overwritten at deployment time. There is a simple plugin available to perform this for us though:

[user@host github-username.github.io]$ npm install hexo-generator-cname --save
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ cat - >> _config.yml <<EOF
plugins:
- hexo-generator-cname
EOF

Now when hexo generate is run, a CNAME file containing your domain name (configured from the url variable in _config.yml) will be created.

Lastly, you need to login to your DNS provider and create a DNS CNAME record pointing hostname www to your-github-username.github.io. This can take a few hours to replicate.

Using This Setup

Now that the configuration is complete, we can actually publish some posts!

Leverging Git: A Branching Strategy

We have 2 unrelated branches in our repo: master; blog-setup. We never directly edit anything in master, that’s updated for us when we run hexo deploy. The blog-setup branch contains the hexo site and i create branches off that for each of my posts:

[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git branch
* blog-setup
master
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git checkout -b my-next-post-topic
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ hexo new post "My Next Post Topic"
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git add .
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git commit -m "Started topic"
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git push -u origin my-next-post-topic

When i’ve made my last commit and i’m ready to publish, i merge the branch back to blog-setup before running hexo generate and hexo deploy. The neat thing about pushing the branch upstream is that i can work on it over a few days from different machines, using Github as both an offsite backup and a synchronisation mechanism.