How can I read in project readme.md's into a user.github.com site?

Question

Github now has automatic page generation for projects. Thats brill - it reads in the readme.markdown file in the project root and creates a neat site using a template.

The thing missing though is user.github.com pages. Is there anyway to (either automatically or by passing a config file) read in all of my current GitHub projects readme documents and push into a site design for a user.github.com template system??

Thanks!

Answer 1

The 'user.github.com' sites are built via GitHub Pages. They are independent repositories, the name of which matches the domain where they will appear. For example, my github username is 'alanwsmith'. I've got a repo called 'alanwsmith.github.com' which is processed via jekyll and available at: http://alanwsmith.github.com/.

Since they are independent and valid repositories, the GitHub doesn't apply any automation to them. The processing via jekyll only outputs the site. It doesn't mess with the contents of the repo itself. If you want to automatically list all your project Readme files on your user.github.com domain, you'll have to build your own process to gather the files and drop them in the source repo.

Of course, your individual user page (e.g. https://github.com/alanwsmith instead of http://alanwsmith.github.com/) lists your repos. Those links point to the individual project pages which, as you mention, display the readme files. I think that's as close as GitHub gets to doing what you want at this point in time.

More details on GitHub Pages can be found in the GitHub Pages Help section.