Publishing With Make

I mentioned before my habit of tinkering on my site’s code without end. This kept me from writing. So I started over. I wanted to set myself up for writing more frequently, and starting over felt like the best move.

I also wanted to keep a lookout for other areas that created friction. One I quickly saw was using Git. It’s not great for the writing process.

I’d create a file, stage it, commit it, then push it. I did these last three steps over and over to fix small things, adding commit messages like “Fix typo” or “Correct grammar.” I was just going through the motions—I don’t really care about the commit messages.

So I put together a simple Makefile to make this work.

commit-content:
	git checkout main
	git status
	git add content
	git commit -m "Publishing content $(shell date)"

publish: commit-content
	git push origin main

.PHONY: commit-content publish

This is assuming that I want to commit everything in the content directory, which has always been true. Now when I write and want to publish, I run make publish and it goes through all the motions for me.

Once it’s on GitHub, Netlify picks it up and publishes a new site in a few seconds.