Add a --no-history optin to avoid growing branch weight

Hi there,

First of all, thanks for you tool. It’s really useful and easy to use.

As a new feature, I would suggest to add a --no-history option.

Deploying regularly to the branch gh-pages make its the git history growing again and again. But this branch (or any branch used to host static content) doesn’t really need to be versioned into the history.

There is a similar tool written in nodejs which has an option --no-history to overwrite the previous commit: gh-pages. It’s reported that it works well, as it in a GH Action.

- name: deploy to gh pages
  run: |
    echo "Deploying to directory: ${{env.BRANCH_NAME}}"
    git config --global user.name "github-actions[bot]"
    git config --global user.email "github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
    npx gh-pages --dist dist/ --dest ${{env.BRANCH_NAME}} --remove "${{env.BRANCH_NAME}}/**" --no-history --repo "https://${GITHUB_ACTOR}:${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}@github.com/${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}.git"

NPM option: https://www.npmjs.com/package/gh-pages#optionshistory

Original issue: https://github.com/geotribu/website/issues/302 by @fgravin

[c-w]

Thanks for confirming. The functionality has been released in version 1.1.0.

[Guts]

You’re right, here comes more information to track on this.

Sys info

$ git --version
git version 2.31.0
$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
Release:	20.04
Codename:	focal

Repository used to test

Repo main page: https://github.com/Guts/DicoGIS gh-pages branch: https://github.com/Guts/DicoGIS/tree/gh-pages

Published doc: https://guts.github.io/DicoGIS/ with page about doc process https://guts.github.io/DicoGIS/development/documentation.html

Github Action: https://github.com/Guts/DicoGIS/blob/master/.github/workflows/docs_builder.yml

Conclusion

It was just about options order and positional arg:

• 🔴 ghp-import --force --no-jekyll --push docs/_build/html --no-history
• ✔️ ghp-import --force --no-jekyll --push --no-history docs/_build/html

😉