Updating website; Woes Ensue!

After not updating my site for a couple of months, I was looking to update with a new blog post. As it turns out, I had forgotten the setup/layout for the Gatsby starter I was using, so updating it was very difficult. I ended up scrapping the whole thing for another starter template which is much simpler, easier to read and extend.

Other woes I ran into had to deal with the npm module gh-pages, caching and deployment. In trying to deploy to repo brennx0r.github.io, master branch - I kept getting this error:

bash fatal: A branch named ‘master’ already exists.

npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE npm ERR! errno 1 npm ERR! gatsby-starter-blog@1.0.0 deploy: gatsby build && gh-pages -d public -b > master -r git@github.com:brennx0r/brennx0r.github.io.git npm ERR! Exit status 1 npm ERR!

After scouring a number of sites (and frustratingly getting the ‘answer’ of referring back to the Gatsby reference material which does not explain how to fix the problem), I was finally able to see some documentation via the gh-pages readme about a potential solution which ended up resolving it for me: Clearing the cache for gh-pages via node_modules/gh-pages/.cache.

Passing along this information to folks who may also be looking for a fix. 💜 ✨

Written by Brenna Flood (they/them or she/her), software engineering leader and co-organizer of the Open Source and Feelings conference. Follow them on Mastodon.