Push our Hugo site to GitHub

Last updated on 2025-01-30 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • How do we save and track our local changes in git?
  • How do we send our changes to our GitHub repository?
  • How do we open and merge a Pull Request?

Objectives

  • Push the Hugo site to GitHub and use a Pull Request to bring it into the main branch

In this episode, we will push the changes we made in our local repository back to the remote repository on GitHub.

For more detail on the workflows used in this episode, see the Version Control with Git Software Carpentry lesson.

  1. First of all, we need to tell git to track all of the changes we have created. We do this by adding them to git’s staging area.

BASH 

git add .

As we saw before, here the . means “please add everything in this current location.”

If you now run git status you should see a similar output as below.

BASH 

git status

OUTPUT 

On branch setup-hugo
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
    new file:   .gitmodules
    new file:   archetypes/default.md
    new file:   config.toml
    new file:   themes/anatole
  1. To tell git to make a snapshot (or “commit”) of the current state of our files, we use the git commit command, passing the -m flag in order to leave a message about what we’ve changed.

BASH 

git commit -m "Initial setup of blog site"

The output should look similar to below.

OUTPUT 

[setup-hugo 62d794e] Initial setup of blog site
 4 files changed, 19 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 .gitmodules
 create mode 100644 archetypes/default.md
 create mode 100644 config.toml
 create mode 160000 themes/anatole

Now if we run git status again, we should see the message nothing to commit, working tree clean

  1. Now we push this commit from our local commit up to the GitHub server using the git push command. In the below command, origin is a reference to the original repo we setup on GitHub, and setup-hugo represents an instruction to create a new branch on the GitHub-hosted repo with the same name as our locally-created branch.

BASH 

git push origin setup-hugo

OUTPUT 

Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote:
remote: Create a pull request for 'setup-hugo' on GitHub by visiting:
remote:      https://github.com/HelmUpgradeBot/HelmUpgradeBot.github.io/pull/new/setup-hugo
remote:
To https://github.com/HelmUpgradeBot/HelmUpgradeBot.github.io.git
* [new branch]      setup-hugo -> setup-hugo
  1. If we head back onto GitHub to our repo’s page, we should now see a banner informing us that a branch has been updated and providing us with an option to “Compare & pull request”. Click that big, green button!
GitHub repo page with a banner and "Compare & pull request" button
GitHub repo page with a banner and “Compare & pull request” button

You will be redirected to GitHub’s interface for opening a Pull Request (PR). Give your PR an informative title and a descriptive summary in the relevant boxes, then click “Create pull request”.

If we had any tests for our website, this is where they’d run before we merged the PR. However, we’ll set up our tests next, so go ahead and click “Merge pull request”, followed by “Confirm merge”.

If you head back over to the repo’s landing page, you’ll see our changes have now been added to the main branch - but that doesn’t mean our blog is live and deployed yet!

The GitHub repo's `main` branch with the hugo files now added to it
The GitHub repo’s main branch with the hugo files now added to it

First, let’s update our local copy of the repo and then we can add a GitHub Action workflow to automatically deploy our website for us.

In your terminal, run the following git checkout and git pull commands.

BASH 

git checkout main

OUTPUT 

warning: unable to rmdir 'themes/anatole': Directory not empty
Switched to branch 'main'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Note that, this time, we did not use the -b flag in the git checkout command because we are switching to a branch that already exists, not creating a new one.

BASH 

git pull

OUTPUT 

remote: Enumerating objects: 1, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (1/1), done.
remote: Total 1 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (1/1), 636 bytes | 636.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://github.com/HelmUpgradeBot/HelmUpgradeBot.github.io
   594286e..cd19a8f  main       -> origin/main
Updating 594286e..cd19a8f
Fast-forward
 .gitmodules           | 3 +++
 archetypes/default.md | 6 ++++++
 config.toml           | 3 +++
 themes/anatole        | 1 +
 4 files changed, 13 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 .gitmodules
 create mode 100644 archetypes/default.md
 create mode 100644 config.toml
 create mode 160000 themes/anatole

Key Points

  • Local changes are saved and tracked using the git add and git commit commands
  • The remote repository on GitHub is synced with a local repository using git push. The reverse sync is achieved with git pull.
  • A Pull Request can be opened and merged in the GitHub browser interface