Migrating to CircleCI

I spent a good portion of the last year freelancing at Plainspoken Digital, and although it was a thrilling experience, it left me without much time to keep the site updated. When I came back to it, Travis-CI had changed their prices and it was no longer economical free to run the build like I described in an early post.

After a really quick search I landed on Circle CI. I should have searched more, but truthfully all I need is a simple and well documented CI/CD tool to replace Travis, and allow my website to build before hosting to github pages (this allows you to take leverage non-Github-pages supported Jekyll plugins).

My use case was much simpler than what they outlined in their guide, so I pieced together a solution from the CircleCI guide on GitHub pages, and this Medium guide by Matthias Bruns, which was helpful. Below is a rough outline of my steps:

1. Create an account with CircleCI and connect your account with GitHub. I don’t believe I needed to follow any additional authentication steps past the prompts.
2. In your repository, create a new folder called .circleci in the root directory, and add two blank files: config.yml and deploy.sh. CircleCI knows to look in this folder.
3. Follow the set up instructions within the CircleCI interface for your GitHub-pages repo. I clicked the Fast: option and relied on my existing config.
4. In the config.yml file I put the following code -

version: 2
jobs:
  deploy:
    docker:
      - image: circleci/ruby:latest
        environment:
          USER_NAME: ${USER_NAME}
          USER_EMAIL: ${USER_EMAIL}
    steps:
      - checkout
      - run:
          name: install dependencies
          command: |
            gem install bundler
            bundle update --bundler
      - run: bundle install --path=vendor/bundle && bundle clean
      - run: JEKYLL_ENV=production bundle exec jekyll build
      - deploy:
          name: Deploy Release to GitHub
          command: |
              bash .circleci/deploy.sh
workflows:
  version: 2
  build:
    jobs:
      - deploy:
          filters:
            branches:
              only: 
                - gh-pages

1. In the deploy.sh script, I put the following code -

git config user.name "$USER_NAME"
git config user.email "$USER_EMAIL"

git checkout gh-pages
git pull origin gh-pages

find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name '_site' ! -name '.git' ! -name '.gitignore' ! -name '.circleci' -exec rm -rf {} \;
mv _site/* .
rm -R _site/

git add -fA
git commit --allow-empty -m "$(git log source -1 --pretty=%B)"
git push -f origin master

echo "deployed successfully"

After that, I pushed to the gh-pages branch that CircleCI and GitHub Pages both expect, with everything more or less working smoothly from there!