In this tutorial I’d like to show how to publish a Maven Site to GitHub Pages. You can find several documents on the web about this subject, but I decided to publish one myself because the documents I found refer to a deprecated plugin (https://github.com/github/maven-plugins/tree/master/github-site-plugin) or show complicated settings, also when using the official Maven plugin that I’m going to use myself in this post, Apache Maven SCM Publish Plugin, https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-scm-publish-plugin/index.html (probably because the documents I found are somehow old, and they refer to an old version of such a plugin, which has probably been improved a lot since then).

I’m going to use a very simple Java example. The final project is available here: https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/maven-site-github-example.

Create the Java Maven project

Let’s create a simple Java project using the archetype (of course, I’m going to use fake names for the groupId and artifactId, but such values should be used consistently from now on):

This will create the my-app folder with the Maven project. Let’s cd into that folder and make sure it compiles fine:

We can also generate the site of this project (in its default shape):

The site will be generated in the target/site folder and can be opened with a browser; for example, let’s open its index.html:

GitHub setup

Let’s publish the Maven project on GitHub; in my case it’s in https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/maven-site-github-example.

Now we have to setup gh-pages branch on our Git repository. This step is required the first time only. (You might want to have a look at https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/about-github-pages if you’re note familiar with GitHub pages).

Let’s prepare the gh-pages branch: this will be a separate branch in the Git repository, we create it as an orphan branch (see also https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-scm-publish-plugin/various-tips.html). WARNING: the following commands will wipe out the current contents of the local Git repository, so make sure you don’t have any uncommitted changes! Let’s run the following commands in the main folder of the Git repository:

1. git checkout --orphan gh-pages to create the branch locally,
2. rm .git/index ; git clean -fdx to clean the branch content and let it empty,
3. echo "It works" > index.html to create an initial site content
4. git add . && git commit -m "initial site content" && git push origin gh-pages to commit and push to the branch gh-pages

The corresponding web site will be published in your GitHub project’s corresponding URL; in my case it is https://lorenzobettini.github.io/maven-site-github-example:  This should show “It works”

Now we can go back to the master branch:

and remove the index.html we previously created.

Maven POM configuration

Let’s see how to configure our POM to automatically publish the Maven site to GitHub pages.

First, we must specify the distribution management section:

Remember that you will have to use the URL corresponding to your own GitHub project (including your GitHub user id).

Then, we configure the maven-scm-publish-plugin configuration in the pluginManagement section (we configure it there, and then we will call its goals directly from the command line – such a plugin can also be configured to be bound to the Maven lifecycle, but that’s out of the scope of this tutorial, you might want to have a look here in case: https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-scm-publish-plugin/usage.html). Note that we specify the gh-pages branch:

Publish the site

Now, publishing the Maven site to GitHub pages it’s just a matter of running:

Wait for the plugin to perform its job.

What the plugin does is

1. It first checks out the contents of the gh-pages branch from GitHub into a local folder (by default, target/scmpublish-checkout);
2. Then locally staged site content is applied to the check-out, issuing appropriate Git commands to add and delete entries, followed by a commit and a push.

Now the site is on GitHub Pages:

Improve the site contents

Just for demonstration, let’s enrich the site a bit by using the Maven Archetype Site, https://maven.apache.org/archetypes/maven-archetype-site.

We layer this archetype upon our existing project, so we must run it from the directory containing our current Maven project and specify the same groupId and artifactId we specified when we created the Maven project:

The archetype will update our project with a src/site directory containing a few example contents in Markdown, APT, etc. It will also update our POM with some configuration for maven-project-info-reports-plugin and for i18n localization. Moreover, a new skin will be used for the final site, maven-fluido-skin.

You might want to have a look locally by regenerating the site.

Let’s publish the new site, again by running

Now it’s on GitHub Pages (it might take some time for the new website to be updated on GitHub and browser reload might help):

To jump to the published website you could also use the GitHub web interface: click on the “environment” link and then on the “View deployment” button corresponding to the latest pushed commit on the gh-pages branch:

Now you could experiment by adding/changing/removing the contents of the directory src/site and then publish the website again through Maven.

Remember

What’s in your Maven project (e.g., master branch) contains the sources of the site, while, what’s in the gh-pages branch on GitHub will contain the generated website. You won’t modify the contents of gh-pages branch manually: the Apache Maven SCM Publish will do that for you.

Hope you enjoy this tutorial 🙂