Host any front end project with GitHub Pages

Sunday 27 April 2014

Sometimes you want to work on a simple web page, and you don’t want the burden of having to setup some hosting environment.

Once again, GitHub Pages can help you. By creating a repo and working in the gh-pages branch instead of master, you will automatically get your site up and running.

Bonus point, you can set a CNAME to host it under your own domain.

Follow this gist, and do it all from the terminal!

	# What is your GitHub username? & your project name? Change with your own
	GITHUB_USERNAME="ssaunier"
	PROJECT_NAME="minesweep"

	# We can create GitHub repo from the terminal, with https://github.com/github/hub
	# It's really convinient. You can download it with:
	brew install hub

	# Say you want to work on a minesweep, create the repo:
	mkdir -p ~/code/$GITHUB_USERNAME/$PROJECT_NAME && cd $_

	# Initialize the git repo and change the branch to gh-pages right away
	git init
	git checkout -b gh-pages

	# Create the GitHub repo. At first usage, it will prompt you for your credentials
	hub create

	# We will notify GitHub Pages that this is not a Jekyll repo
	touch .nojekyll
	echo "Hello world" > index.html
	git add .
	git commit -m "This is not a Jekyll repo"
	git push -u origin gh-pages

	# You can visualize the GitHub repo with:
	hub browse

	# Wait a few minutes, and you should see "Hello world" at:
	open http://$GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io/$PROJECT_NAME

	# Of course, you can set it to answer to a specific CNAME (Then it would drop the
	# project name automatically after the slash)
	echo "$PROJECT_NAME.saunier.me" > CNAME # Change with your own URL
	git add CNAME
	git commit -m "Adding CNAME"
	git push origin gh-pages

	# Now go to OVH / Gandi / your DNS provider and record a CNAME from
	# "$PROJECT_NAME" to "$GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io." (trailing dot is SO important)

view raw github_pages_repo.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

You’re welcome :)