Hosting a self-built jekyll site on GH pages

This blog is built from markdown files using Jekyll hosted on GitHub pages, which saves a lot of hassle involved with DIY hosting[^hassle]. There are a bunch of useful tutorials on how to set all this up. However, I like to have control over which plugins are used, etc. which GitHub pages doesn't let you do. What it (GH pages) does let you do, though, is dump a bunch of files (html, js, css) in a repo and just serve them as-is. These files represent the "built" version of your site, not the source, so you'll probably want a separate repo for your content (e.g. your markdown files) and the built site. Handling this stuff can be a hassle, so here's the Makefile I use to make it easy. The basic process is: create a git repo where you keep your jekyll site (or not, but it's so nice to have your blog content under version control) create a separate project on GitLab called $(GHUSERNAME)/$(GHUSERNAME).github.io.git, but don't create anything in there yet make init will turn the local jekyll build directory into a git repo make push target will build your site (locally) and push it up to GitHub, where it'll be served by GitHub pages After that, you can work on, commit & push your blog wherever you like (I actually keep the content in the same GH repo, but in a source branch) but you can push the built site to the master branch so GH pages will serve it up for you. [^hassle]: I know that it's not actually that much hassle, especially if you've already got a webserver set up for other reasons, but zero hassle still beats ε hassle ∀ε>0, especially when there's other work to be done.