I’ve been using Jekyll to build this blog for a while now, but since I haven’t been updating this blog often, I always forget the basic git workflow for pushing updated content from my local computer onto Github. Therefore, I’m writing a short guide to quickly update a Github blog when new posts are created.

Update blog from user computer to Github

Note: instructions here assumes you have already set up a Github blog, using static site generators such as Jekyll. For instructions on how to do that I refer to Github’s tutorial on Setting up your GitHub Pages site locally with Jekyll.

Assuming you’ve just finished creating a post on your local computer and you are ready to push the content onto Github. Navigate to your blog directory (i.e. directory that contains .git/) in command line, and do the following:

git add .
git commit -m "descriptive-message-of-changes-to-be-committed"
git push

This will add all files in the directory to the staging area, then commit them to be submitted to Github. You will be required to include a message with the changes (this is a good practice anyway). At this step the changes you’ve made still only exist on the local computer. By runningpush you will send the updated files to Github and finish the update process.

So that’s it! Happy blogging!

Other tips

  • To see if any other files are not updated between branches, you can check the status of file-keeping with

      git status

  • You can also preview the blog on your local computer by

      jekyll serve

    The prompt will show you a server address, (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:4444) that you can then open with in a browser to see a preview of your blog.

  • Sometimes if you mess with the _config.yml file that contains Jekyll’s configuration parameters, you may introduce errors that will prevent Github from updating any changes. YAML files are very sensitive to formatting, so sometimes even missing a white space can ruin things. To check for errors, you can use the YAML validator from Code Beautify.