Hakyll

Finally I’ve set up Hakyll! The current setup uses Hakyll to generate static site and Github pages to host it. It took me a fair amount of time to make things run smoothly. If you want to create a blog using Hakyll and Github pages, here is one way you could get things running.

1. Download Hakyll

   If you have cabal-install installed, you may download it using cabal install hakyll, if not, you can download it using your package manager.

2. Now that you have Hakyll, generate the necessary files on your computer by running hakyll-init name-of-your-blog.

3. Create repository at Github

   The name of the repository should be your-userid.github.io in order to use Github pages.

4. Initialize the git repository: git init.

5. Create .gitignore.

   Here is what my .gitignore looks like.

6. git remote add origin https://github.com/username/username.github.io.git

7. Compile site.hs by ghc --make site.hs.

8. git commit --allow-empty -m "dummy".

9. git checkout --orphan source.

10. git submodule add https://github.com/username/username.github.io _site

11. In order to generate files, you can use ./site build but if you have made deletions, then the changes do not propagate to _site folder. So you will have to use ./site rebuild which basically removes the _site folder and then starts a fresh build. The problem here is that rebuild will remove all contents of _site folder including the .git file, which messes up things. To combat this problem, I wrote a tiny script clean.sh which you can get here. I recommend you download it, keep it in the same directory where site executable is placed and use the script instead of ./site rebuild (you have to run sh clean.sh.)

    If, by mistake, the .git file inside _site got removed, you may create a file with the same name having content gitdir: ../.git/modules/_site.

12. cd _site, git add --all, git commit -m 'changes'.

13. Push the changes (of _site folder) to github by git push origin master. Similarly, push the changes of the root folder (the source branch) to github by git push origin source.

Bonus: In the current setup, once you make the necessary changes, you will have to first commit in _site, push to master, commit and push source. Basically you are repeating yourself. If you want to avoid this, you may you the shell script bot. Once you have in in the source directory, then run the command ./bot "Your commit message".

That’s it. Now your blog will be live at the address username.github.io!

Listings

bot script:

cd _site
git add .
git commit -m "$1"
git push origin master
cd ..
git add .
git commit -m "$1"
git push origin source

clean.sh script:

cp _site/.git /tmp
./site rebuild
cp /tmp/.git _site/