Working on a project's Github page

Question

I've just cloned a repo I have hosted on Github but this only checked out the master branch. There's also a gh-pages branch that Github creates automatically to host the project's site.

I want to also clone (checkout? pull?) this branch to work on it and I've found a lot of material on this that got me a bit confused.

This answer says that I should do:

git checkout -b gh-pages origin/gh-pages

and this one implies the command could be:

git branch -f gh-pages upstream/gh-pages

What is the difference between these two? Should I stick with the first one?

---

Add. If I do git branch -a I get:

remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
remotes/origin/gh-pages
remotes/origin/master

Answer 1

• The first one creates a branch gh-pages if that branch doesn't exist.
• The second one forces an existing gh-pages branch to upstream/gh-page .

Personally, I prefer declaring gh-pages branch as a submodule .
That allows you to work on master, while seeing/updating the gh-pages content in a gh-pages subfolder (declared as a submodule).

---

Update August 2016: Simpler GitHub Pages publishing now allows to keep your page files in a subfolder of the same branch (no more gh-pages needed):

So you don't even have to checkout another branch now (uf the upstream repo chose the new content organization)