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Moving Site from GitHub
Hi All,
So yesterday I decided to move my site from github.io to one of my personal domains. I am not sure why I decided this. I mean Github provides a great free service. And I had lots of automation in place. In this article I will just cover how i went about updating all pages with redirects from github to the new domain.
My goal was to leave my old site up on GitHub for a few weeks to give Google some time to update its indexing. With all old pages being able to redirect to their new counterparts. This requires that I have redirects in place for each page. I will then remove the github site repo.
From my understanding. There is no support for server side redirects. This left me with the option of using HTML/JavaScript redirects.
I did a fair amount of reading before tacking this mini project.
I chose to go with the HTML rewrite approach.
One of the reason for this is that I create my site using two Github repos. One is private with some workflow actions which populates the second public repo. The public repo only has the generated webpage code.
One of the reason for this is that I create my site using two Github repos. One is private with some workflow actions which populates the second public repo. The public repo only has the generated webpage code.
Since I am focusing on the re-write script. I am going to assume you have done the following things.
In my case this was pretty straight forward. My site is being served from a repo that only contains the page code. So working in a seperate area from my normal local copy of my private repo I simply cloned the public site to my local machine.
git clone [email protected]:Bas-Man/bas-man.github.io.gitWithin this directory. I then removed files and folders that would not be needed.
Those sorts of things.
I decided to go with the following
html code with some adjustments.<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url={{THE_NEW_URL}}" />
<link rel="canonical" href="{{THE_NEW_URL}}" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>
The page been moved to <a href="{{THE_NEW_URL}}">{{THE_NEW_URL}}</a>
</h1>
</body>
</html>Within this local repo I created a file called
source with the following contents<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=https://bas-man.dev/NAME" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://bas-man.dev/NAME" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>
The page been moved to <a href="https://bas-man.dev/NAME">https://bas-man.dev</a>
</h1>
</body>
</html>The value
NAME is just a place holder and will be replaced in each file using the output of the good old trusty sed command.For this I chose the following.
find . -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file
do
echo "$file"
doneAnd did some testing which gave a huge amount of output.
--snip--
./categories/coding/page/4/index.html
./categories/coding/page/3
./categories/coding/page/3/index.html
./categories/coding/page/2
./categories/coding/page/2/index.html
./categories/coding/page/5
./categories/coding/page/5/index.html
./categories/coding/index.html
./categories/automation
./categories/automation/page
./categories/automation/page/1
./categories/automation/page/1/index.html
./categories/automation/index.html
./categories/front-end
./categories/front-end/pageStraight away I noticed there would be an issue with the
./ at the start of each line. But I will get to that. What I want to do is to replace any file ending in
.html with the contents of source where name has been replaced with the path to the html file. Let's take a look at a simple example from above./categories/coding/index.html needs to have its contents replaced with the contents of source but with NAME replaced with categories/coding/index.html.<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=https://bas-man.dev/categories/coding/index.html" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://bas-man.dev/categories/coding/index.html" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>
The page been moved to <a href="https://bas-man.dev/categories/coding/index.html">https://bas-man.dev</a>
</h1>
</body>
</html>find . -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file
do
if [ "${file: -4}" == "html" ] ; then
cat ./source | sed "s|NAME|${file:2}|g" > ${file}
fi
donehtml. To do this we use ${file: -4} which return the last 4 characters of file. If this is true we will replace the contents of file.
##### Re-write the file contentscat, sed and > the output redirect.
- I pass the contents of
sourceto sed. - Sed then replaces
NAMEwith the value offilestarting from the 3rd character. We count from 0. So 0,1,2 <- 3 position. - I use double quotes since I am doing interpolation
- I use
|since of/as my separator since my string also contains/characters. - I use the
goption since I need to place all occurances ofNAME, so using greedy mode.
With this done. I take the easy way and run the script by a shell. The script was simply called
updatesh updateAnd all the HTML files are updated with the correct references to the exact same pages, but to the new domain.
From here it was a simple matter to update the repo with some git commands and push the updates back up to GitHub
git add .
git reset -- update
git reset -- source
git commit -m "my comment"
git push -u originThe resets were just to remove the two files I didn't need pushed to the live site.
That's about it. Seems to have worked pretty well. I just need to keep an eyes on things and see if I need to make any changes.
Hope this might help others.
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