I recently moved the _layouts and _sass folders into their own theme repo. This resulted in me having trouble updating my website automatically when the theme is updated. I tried pushing empty commits to the Github pages repo but that started to get annoying after sometime. I did a little digging and found that github has an Pages Api for exactly this.

Get Authorization token

First go to https://github.com/settings/tokens and under personal access tokens, click on Generate new token. Give the token a name and select public_repo scope and click Generate token button at the bottom. Copy the token value and store it in a safe place.

API Request

curl -H "Authorization: token $AUTH_TOKEN" -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.mister-fantastic-preview+json" -X POST https://api.github.com/repos/:user/:repo/pages/builds

In the above bash snippet replace $AUTH_TOKEN with your Personal access token. Then replace the :user with your username and :repo with your gh-pages repository name.

When you run the above command in bash, you should get something like this.

{
  "status": "queued",
  "url": "https://api.github.com/repositories/12667135/pages/builds/latest"
}