Deployment

TravisCI

Project Site

You can easily deploy a cobalt site to gh-pages! To do this with travis is also very easy.

1. Create your .travis.yml file:

sudo: false
before_script:
  - curl -LSfs https://japaric.github.io/trust/install.sh |
    sh -s --
    --git cobalt-org/cobalt.rs
    --crate cobalt
    --force
    --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
    --tag v0.15.0
  - export PATH="$PATH:~/.cargo/bin"
script:
  - cobalt build

deploy:
  provider: pages
  skip_cleanup: true
  github_token: $GH_TOKEN
  local_dir: _site
  target_branch: master
  on:
    branch: source

• --tag: update to reflect the desired version of cobalt.
• local_dir: update it according to your destination
• target_branch: Update to reflect the branch that you configured as the source for Github Pages.
• on: branch: Update to reflect the branch your source is kept in.

2. Configure your GH_TOKEN

This is a limited access API token for Travis to commit to your page's github repo. You can create one here.

To add it to your .travis.yml file, you will need to use the travis cli tool. This will encrypt the token specifically to your repo and branch.

Example: travis encrypt GH_TOKEN=... --add env.global

Personal or Organization Site

The main difference with a personal site is that github only allows the master branch to serve the pages. Instead, you could keep your source in another branch, like source and have cobalt import your site into the master branch.

GitLab CI

You can also deploy a cobalt site to Gitlab Pages using GitLab CI. GitLab CI uses Docker, so there are many ways to accomplish building your cobalt site.

This example .gitlab-ci.yml installs and runs cobalt:

image: debian:latest

variables:
  COBALT_VERSION: "v0.15.0"
pages:
  script:
  - apt-get update && apt-get -y install curl
  - curl -LSfs https://japaric.github.io/trust/install.sh |
    sh -s --
    --git cobalt-org/cobalt.rs
    --crate cobalt
    --force
    --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
    --tag $COBALT_VERSION
  - export PATH="$PATH:~/.cargo/bin"
  - mkdir -p public
  - cobalt build -d public
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public/
  only:
  - master

Other

To import your site to your gh-pages branch you can either pass a build --import flag when you build the site or after you have build the site with build you can run import. There are also some flags that can be found via import --help.

Self-hosted

If you host your site yourself, for example on a virtual private server, here are some ideas on how to deploy.

Simple uploading

You can use tools such as rsync, or other file synchronization tools to upload your rendered site to a web server. For example (note that this will delete all extraneous files on your server):

$ rsync --delete -a _site/ YOUR-SERVER:public_html/

Publishing with git

Note that this section assumes familiarity with git, so if you are not familiar with git, feel free to ignore it, or take the time to make yourself familiar. It further assumes you already keep your cobalt project in git, as well as basic familiarity with Unix-like systems.

Instead of just copying the locally rendered site to your web server, you can install cobalt and git on the web server, and publish via pushing to a git repository. This is advantageous especially in a multi-user setting, where multiple users (or maybe just yourself using different machines) are maintaining the same site, as git will prevent users from overwriting each other's changes. Conflicts will have to be resolved locally by git rebasing and/or merging.

To set this up, you will need to have both cobalt and git installed on your server. Then, create a bare repository on your server and configure it as a remote in your local cobalt repository to be able to push to it. Once that is done, you can set up a post-update hook on the server's git repository to render your site. To make that process reliable in case cobalt fails to render your site, you can use the cobalt-git-deploy script. To learn more about cobalt-git-deploy, call it with the --help option. Specifically, you should make sure that the directories it is invoked with from the git hook are not already existing.

Assuming you have installed cobalt-git-deploy somewhere in your PATH, create a post-update hook on the server's git repository that looks something like this:

$ cat homepage.git/hooks/post-update
#!/bin/sh

PATH="$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"
export PATH

exec cobalt-git-deploy ~/cobalt-stage ~/public_html

Make sure that your hook is executable. Now pushing to the repository should show status information from the hook, e.g.:

$ git push
No previous state saved. First run?
Checking out master to /home/foo/cobalt-stage/left
Already on 'master'
HEAD is now at 9ef95c1 New exciting blog post
Building site
[info] Building from "/home/foo/cobalt-stage/left/" into "/home/foo/cobalt-stage/left/_site"
[info] Build successful
Deploying site in /home/foo/public_html

You can now enjoy publishing using git commit and git push!