Simple stupid stripped-down example of how to deploy dbt docs to Github pages.
The only manual configuration required is to set the Github Pages to run off the root directiory of the gh-pages branch. You can configure this in your Github repo's Settings > Pages.
Deployed docs here: https://dwreeves.github.io/dbt_docs_ghpages_example/
First, the dbt docs are generated: dbt docs generate. Then we move the necessary files (index.html, catalog.json, manifest.json) into its own folder (docs/).
Next, we use a Python package called ghp-import. This tool is what mkdocs gh-deploy uses under the hood. This tool uploads a directory (in this case, the directory with our docs, i.e. docs/) to Github pages via git push origin gh-pages.
gh-pages reads whatever branch you have set up as a simple static website, and that's exactly what dbt docs generate provides. So at this point everything is ready.
And that's it!
Please be aware that private must be using GitHub Enterprise Cloud to hide your docs from public view.
If you do not have this enabled, I suggest looking into alternate ways to deploy your dbt docs.
Note: I am also the creator of Cosmos's docs hosting functionality. So if your organization uses Apache Airflow, you can host dbt docs securely this way too. Use of Cosmos's dbt docs feature does not require use of Cosmos in your Airflow DAGs.
This repo was originally created as a suggestion for this code base, as the original dbt docs deployment design was both less secure and also assumed a lot of AWS permissions that many data teams would not realistically have (ability to manage resources through CloudFormation). They have now adapted this pattern into their code. Hooray!