Hosting websites/homepages on GitHub Pages

Questions

• How to serve a website/homepage using GitHub

Hosting websites/homepages on GitHub Pages

You can host your personal homepage or group webpage or project website on GitHub using GitHub Pages.

GitLab and Bitbucket also offer a very similar solution.

Unless you need user authentication or a sophisticated database behind your website, GitHub Pages can be a very nice alternative to running your own web servers.

This is how all https://coderefinery.org material is hosted.

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Scheme that describes how branch names end up websites.

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Exercise: Your own github page

• Deploy own website reusing a template:

  • Follow the steps from GitHub Pages https://pages.github.com/. The documentation there is very good so there is no need for us to duplicate the screenshots

  • Select “Project site”

  • Select “Choose a theme” (for instance “Minimal”)

  • Click “Select theme”

  • Adjust the README.md and commit

  • Browse your page on http://username.github.io/repository (adjust “username” and “repository”)

• Make a change to the repository after the webpage has been deployed for the first time

• Please wait few minutes and then verify that the change shows up on the website

Real-life examples

• Research Software Hour (built using Zola)

  • Source

  • Result: https://researchsoftwarehour.github.io/about/

• This lesson (built using Sphinx and MyST and sphinx-lesson)

  • Source

  • Result: this page

Discussion

• You can use HTML directly or another static site generator if you prefer to not use the default Jekyll.

• It is no problem to use a custom domain instead of *.github.io.