Keeping GitHub pages up to date with your master Auto-sync from master to gh-pages For the RESTXQ specification that I am working on as part of my EXQuery efforts, I need to write up a "formal" specification for RESTXQ. The EXQuery RESTXQ code base lives on GitHub (http://github.com/exquery/exquery), and the specification has been authored in the exquery-restxq-specification module. The RESTXQ specification is authored in HTML using Robin Berjon's excellent ReSpec tool. As specifications are arguably meant to be read by people, it would be nice if we could present the work in progress from the source repository to users as a web page. Fortunately GitHub provides a nice facility for web pages called GitHub Pages. However, the pages are taken from a branch of your GitHub repository called gh-pages. The advantage of this is that your 'pages' can contain different content to your main source code base (i.e. your master branch). If your page content is in your master branch though, you need a facility for keeping the copy in your gh-pages branch up to date with your commits to master. I will not detail how to setup GitHub pages, that is better covered here. I simply wanted to be able to keep a single folder called exquery-restxq-specification from master in sync with my gh-pages. When creating my gh-pages repository, following the instructions above, rather than delete everything in the gh-pages branch, I deleted everything except the exquery-restxq-specification folder, and then committed and pushed. To keep the folder in sync across both branches, we can add a post-commit hook locally to the master branch, so that when we commit changes to that folder in master, the changes are propagated to the gh-pages branch. To add the post-commit hook, create the script: your-repo/.git/hooks/post-commit #!/bin/sh git checkout gh-pages #switch to gh-pages branch git checkout master -- exquery-restxq-specification #checkout just the exquery-restxq-specification folder from master git commit -m "Merge in of specification from master branch" #commit the changes # git push #uncomment if you want to auto-push git checkout master #switch back to the master branch If you are on Linux/MacOSX/Unix, you must ensure that the script has execute permissions, otherwise Git will not execute it. Now simply changing something in the exquery-restxq-specification folder in the master branch and committing, will cause Git to also sync the changes to the gh-pages branch. As a further exercise it might be interesting to take the commit message for gh-pages from the last commit message of master... XQuery Full-Text Search eXist-db