Hosting a Jigsaw Site on GitHub Pages

Last week I re-built this site using the Jigsaw static site generator. Before now I've been hosting my site on a Digital Ocean droplet, but I thought it might be fun to try hosting it through GitHub Pages.

Unfortunatly, Jigsaw's documentation for deploying to GitHub Pages is sparce. My intitial push to the gh-pages branch was easy, but after that I struggled with pushing subsequent updates to the main and gh-pages branches.

I wrestled with trying to come up with a clean deployment strategy until I stumbled upon an awesome blog post by James Brooks. James recently setup his own Jigsaw blog to deploy to Github Pages using GitHub Actions and it's exactly what I was needing.

James' strategy is to store all of the Jigsaw assets in a source branch and then setup a GitHub Action that will build and deploy the static site files to be served in the main branch. This approach doesn't require any crazy git commands and it has the added benefit of being deployable anywhere through GitHub's UI.