04/2023 UPDATE: While the overall idea of the blog post remains unchanged and is still relevant, I no longer recommend to use Travis. Instead use Github Actions (or if you're not using Github, any other CI runner of your choice). The template repo has been updated to use Github Actions. Feel free to read this blog post to get the main idea but then head over to the template repo for a more up to date step by step guide.
Have you ever wished that you had a monorepo (*1 ) containing all of your dev.to posts on GitHub and once you merge an update into the master branch they would just automatically be updated on dev.to?
1) or multiple repositories, it doesn't matter đ
Then you'll be pleased with what's coming, otherwise I'll let you know why you might want that in the next section.
Why would I want to put all my blog posts on a git repo?
- Don't be afraid of messing up one of your articles while editing it
- Same good practices as when you're developing (format, make commits, have a history of your changes, compare when editing, etc)
- Use prettier to format the markdown and all the code snippets
- Let people contribute to your article by creating a PR against it (tired of comments going sideways because of some typos? Just let people know they can make a PR at the end of your blog post)
- Create code examples close to your blog post and make sure they're correct thanks to Embedme (*1)
*1: Embedme allows you to write code in actual files rather than into a Markdown file and then will inject the code for you where needed.
If you prefer not to use Prettier or Embedme, you can do so by simply removing them but I think it's a nice thing to have!
Is it long to setup?
No more than a few minutes. Probably 3 to 5 minutes top, from scratch to automatically deploying an update on one of your blog posts on dev.to using this new setup đ„!
Show me how to set it up!
You can choose whether you want to integrate this workflow into an existing repository or using a template I've made to simplify the process of starting from scratch.
In this blog post we will focus on getting started using the template but reading this you'll realise how easy it would be to integrate in your own workflow.
Main steps:
- 1. Copy the template
- 2. Create a dev.to token
- 3. Pass that token to Travis CI
- 4. Put your blog post(s) into your new repository
1. Copy the template
Go to https://github.com/maxime1992/dev.to and copy the template:
Set the name of the repository as you wish and the description too:
(note: if you want to use the free instance of Travis to continuously deploy your blog posts, the repository has to be public)
Once your repository has been generated, you should see something like the following:
2. Create a dev.to token
Go to https://dev.to/settings/account and give a name to the token so you can remember where you're using it:
Keep the page open for now.
3. Pass that token to Travis
Edit: 8th of July 2020
Beeman has written a great post on dev.to to use Github Actions:
Automate your DEV Posts using GitHub Actions
beeman đ ă» Jul 5 '20 ă» 3 min read
The main advantage of Github Actions over Travis is that you can get 2000mn of free time if the repo is private (which should be more than enough!).
While we'll be focusing on how to use Travis as our CI, do check Beeman's article if you prefer to use Github Actions! =)
Go to https://travis-ci.org/account/repositories
As the GitHub repository has just been created, Travis may not see the repo yet. If that's the case, click on the left on the "Sync account" button to force the refresh of your repositories.
Once that's done you should be able to find your project and you'll need to click on the toggle button on the right to activate it:
You can now click on "settings".
We now need to pass the dev.to token to Travis. Within the "environment variables" section, define a new one called DEV_TO_GIT_TOKEN
. Go back to the dev.to tab where you've generated the token, copy it and paste it into the "value" input.
Once ready, click on the "add" button.
4. Put your blog post(s) into your new repository
First thing that you need to do is make sure that your package.json defines a property repository.url
. It should look like this one: https://github.com/maxime1992/my-dev.to.git with your own username/repository name. It will be used to retrieve your article images from there.
Then, notice that there's a dev-to-git.json
at the root of the project. This is where we will be managing the blog posts we want to publish.
That json file should contain an array, and every entry should have 2 fields: id
and relativePathToArticle
.
Example:
[
{
"id": 133785,
"relativePathToArticle": "./blog-posts/manage-dev-to-blog-posts-with-continuous-deployment/manage-dev-to-blog-posts-with-continuous-deployment.md"
}
]
There's no easy way to manage the creation of an article (yet?) but it's a quick / one time thing. Go to https://dev.to and click at the top on the "write a post" button. Write a title (that can be updated later) and press the "Save Draft" button. This way the article is not published yet and only available to you.
As dev.to doesn't display the ID of a blog post on the page itself, I've made a small query to find it into the page. Open your browser console on the dev.to page of your article and paste the following:
+$('div[data-article-id]').getAttribute('data-article-id');
This will give you the ID of the post to put into dev-to-git.json
.
Your blog post should have a "front matter" header. For example, the one of the blog post I'm currently writing is:
---
published: false
title: "Manage your dev.to blog posts from a GIT repo and use continuous deployment to auto publish/update them"
cover_image: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maxime1992/my-dev.to/master/blog-posts/manage-dev-to-blog-posts-with-continuous-deployment/assets/github-travis-dev-to.png"
description:
tags: devto, publication, blogpost, continuousdeployment, github, travis
series:
canonical_url:
---
This means that you can manage all of those attributes directly from your blog post written in Markdown. How cool is that?
Finally, all the local images links are rewritten to become remote ones that points to the files on GitHub. Yes, even your images can be part of your versioning process đ!
Thanks for reading
Don't be shy, let me know what you think of this project in the comments âșïž. Do you like it? Will you consider using it? If not, I'd love to know what's missing to make it work better for you, with your workflow.
I work at CloudNC in central London and we are recruiting!
We have a hackday every first Friday of the month and it's during the last one that I decided to work on this project. I've open sourced an npm module called dev-to-git that handles most of the heavy work to read and publish on dev.to (which is used by the template repository).
Found a typo?
If you've found a typo, a sentence that could be improved or anything else that should be updated on this blog post, you can access it through a git repository and make a pull request. Instead of posting a comment, please go directly to https://github.com/maxime1992/my-dev.to and open a new pull request with your changes. If you're interested how I manage my dev.to posts through git and CI, read more here.
Oldest comments (54)
Good job ! Thank's you for sharing this with us !
Thanks for the kind words Louis!
Wow! learn something new everyday!
Thanks @maxime1992 , good job!
Much appreciated Carlos đ thanks!
this way seems like an extra step that you need to make before the post. You always need to get the draft id before it posts.
It doesn't seem like it is. It clearly is đ. Unfortunately it's the best I could come up with as dev.to do not use UUIDs. Otherwise it'd have been easy to generate one đ€·ââïž here the only way to automate that part would be to correlate the blog post title but it'd be an issue if you update it (which is obviously not great). As it's a one time thing for an article, I think it's not too bad either though
Maxime, first of all, thanks for the cool idea đ
I have a couple of questions/suggestions:
Hi Fyodor, thanks :)!
1) It'd be great for sure to have something in command line and we've got an issue here github.com/maxime1992/dev-to-git/i... if you have further ideas on that please share there
2) I did not as I'm not yet familiar with github actions. I'd be happy to have a PR if you feel like it though! :) Could you please open an issue first there github.com/maxime1992/dev-to-git/i... so we can discuss it and then we can talk about a PR
Thanks
Thanks for the coordination Maxime! Zak's ideas on id handling look comprehensive, they just need to be implemented) As for github actions, I'm not very familiar with that too, need to research, and I would be happy to contribute if I have enough time, you know. Added the issue to discuss further đ
Good Job! Awesome!!!
Great job! This allows you to have contributors and editors.
Definitely a good fit for that use case! đ
what i was thinking aboutđ a repo of markdown
This is a really good idea with great potential. Image a standarized API for different blogs. You can automatize publishing and editing, multiple collaborators. And use a git provider as unique source of content.
And you can also make your git repo as some sort of blog. I'll use it for my next posts for sure.
Thanks!
Hi Brian,
Thanks! I do intend to push it further and someone else plans to help me out :)!
That was the original purpose. But I realized it wouldn't fit into a hackday so I decided to get the project up and running with support for only one "publisher" (dev.to). My original though was that I'd build something completely abstract and we could choose for one article to publish on multiple "publisher" at the same time (dev.to, medium, etc).
Definitely!
Awesome, glad to hear that! =)
Check out my git jekyll blog takes less than a few minutes to setup.
Jekyll
Awesome. Just on time I was thinking to setup such thing.
Awesome Periklis, if you give it a go let me know if you found the setup easy or if there was any pain point đ
I've literally just moved my Blog from WP to VuePress and publishing it over to Netlify with NetlifyCMS integrated. I'm going to try and integrate this into workflow and see if it works. Thank you for this blog post.
Hey Michael,
Glad you're up to give it a go, let me know how it goes!
Best thing ever!! Thank you so much for sharing đđ»đđ»
Thanks for the kind words Priyanka đ!
I just started writing my articles on a repo and using Jekyll, with rss feed. Only drawback is once article is released on dev, and changed on repo, it won't update.
I'm sorry I might be missing something but I do not understand what you mean, could you be more specific?
What a great idea Maxime! And also a great way to build up your GitHub profile in case you're low on contributions (if some recruiters are looking at your profile)
Thank you very much!
I was just thinking about it a month ago. Create my blog posts on my website (using NetlifyCMS using Git workflow) then a CD/CI tool (CircleCi) would publish them on Dev.io too. đ
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