GitHub Pages offers engineers a zero-cost, integrated solution for hosting documentation, portfolios, and static web apps. It simplifies the deployment pipeline by leveraging existing Git workflows and GitHub Actions, removing the overhead of managing external hosting infrastructure.
Welcome back to GitHub for Beginners. So far, we’ve discussed GitHub Issues and Projects, GitHub Actions, and covered a bit about security. This time, we’re going to talk about GitHub Pages.
Did you know that you have access to a free and secure hosting service on GitHub, readily available for any project? That’s what GitHub Pages is—a way to turn any GitHub repository with a static website into a live site for free. You just need three things:
Follow the steps in this blog and your project will be live, searchable, and ready to share. Let’s get started!
As always, if you prefer to watch the video or want to reference it, we have all of our GitHub for Beginners episodes available on YouTube.
To get started, navigate to the sample repository, and create a fork of the repository that you can use for your own walkthrough. This repository has a static website generated with Next.js. Since it’s already been pushed up to GitHub, it’s ready to deploy.
There are two different ways that you can deploy your project to GitHub Pages: deploying from a branch or using GitHub Actions. First, let’s look at deploying from a branch.
main as the branch to deploy from.This publishes the website from the main branch and makes it publicly available.
Now let’s look at publishing using the GitHub Actions workflow. Since we’re already on the appropriate Settings page, we’ll pick up from here.
main branch is selected, then click Commit changes at the bottom of the window.Congratulations! You have successfully deployed a website to GitHub Pages. Keep in mind that even if your repository is private, the published website will still be public. If you ever want to see who most recently deployed your website, you can do so by navigating back to Settings -> Pages.
By default, all websites on GitHub Pages will have the following URL: USERNAME.github.io/REPOSITORY-NAME.
However, you can update this to use your custom domain if you want. To do this, you’ll first need to configure DNS records with your domain provider. You can read more about how to do this by checking out our docs on managing a custom domain. You’ll also need to verify your domain at the org or profile level.
Once you’ve configured the DNS records and verified the domain, you can set the custom domain by following these steps:
Now you know how to select a project to deploy and create a website for the repository either from a branch or by using GitHub Actions. Not only that, but you can customize the domain, and it’s all available for free! Use this to promote your projects, share what you’re working on, or expand your portfolio, even if the projects themselves are private.
If you want to learn more about GitHub Pages, here are some good places to get started:
Happy coding!
The post GitHub for Beginners: Getting started with GitHub Pages appeared first on The GitHub Blog.
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