GitHub Pages: Powerful and Easy

“It is amazing! I use it for my personal website… Seriously it is like magic” — Brian Zindler

“Oh yeah, that thing’s amazing…. For any project, there’s no reason not to have it. Yeah, I love GitHub pages” — Camille Roussel

“It’s the best fucking thing” — Andy Coenen

What is it?

A static content host.

Why does it rock?

• it’s super easy
• it has unlimited bandwidth
• it’s free

How do you use it?

Make a branch gh-pages on GitHub. That’s it. You’re done.

You can use it to publish projects or host static like docs, super easy. Here are some examples:

• Time Complexity Viewer
• watchout Butters game
• twittler
• David’s Jekyll blog. Or Andy Coenen’s, Brian Zindler’s, or Alan Sun’s
• Bloom Filter false positives
• React docs

The above are my notes from a quick presentation I gave on this subject. And here were the pages that accompanied the presentation:

• Github Pages homepage: https://pages.github.com/
• You can use it to host a blog: https://github.com/dsernst/dsernst.github.io/
• Which can then be accessed from here http://dsernst.com/
• Here’s how you set a custom domain: https://github.com/dsernst/dsernst.github.io/blob/master/CNAME
• More instructions if you need them for a custom domain: https://help.github.com/articles/tips-for-configuring-an-a-record-with-your-dns-provider/
• Github also has an Automatic Page Generator you might like
• You can take projects you’re working on from your local computer, e.g. file:///Users/dsernst/Documents/2014-12-twittler/index.html
• Just push the code to Github https://github.com/dsernst/twittler/
• Make a gh-pages branch, and now it’s deployed http://dsernst.com/twittler/ 404 —> deployed
• Here’s another example, my Time Complexity Viewer: http://dsernst.com/time-complexity-viewer/
• and the matching code (and its gh-pages branch): https://github.com/dsernst/time-complexity-viewer/
• Many projects use this to host documentation, like React: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/getting-started.html
• And Flux, and tons of other things: https://facebook.github.io/flux/
• Here’s an example of it hosting a game: https://github.com/dsernst/watchout -> dsernst.com/watchout
• And here’s an example of using GitHub to host a bash script: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dsernst/dotfiles/master/GaiaLovesYou.sh