GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages are public web pages for users,
organizations, and repositories, that are freely hosted on GitHub’s github.io
domain or on a custom domain name of your choice. GitHub Pages are powered by
Jekyll behind the scenes, so they’re a great way to host your Jekyll-powered
website for free.
Your site is automatically generated by GitHub Pages when you push your source files. Note that GitHub Pages works equally well for regular HTML content, simply because Jekyll treats files without front matter as static assets. So if you only need to push generated HTML, you’re good to go without any further setup.
Never built a website with GitHub Pages before? See this marvelous guide by Jonathan McGlone to get you up and running. This guide will teach you what you need to know about Git, GitHub, and Jekyll to create your very own website on GitHub Pages.
The github-pages gem
Our friends at GitHub have provided the github-pages gem which is used to manage Jekyll and its dependencies on GitHub Pages. Using it in your projects means that when you deploy your site to GitHub Pages, you will not be caught by unexpected differences between various versions of the gems.
Note that GitHub Pages runs in safe mode and only allows a set of whitelisted
plugins.
To use the currently-deployed version of the gem in your project, add the
following to your Gemfile:
source "https://rubygems.org"
gem "github-pages", group: :jekyll_plugins
Be sure to run bundle update often.
GitHub Pages Documentation, Help, and Support
For more information about what you can do with GitHub Pages, as well as for troubleshooting guides, you should check out GitHub’s Pages Help section. If all else fails, you should contact GitHub Support.
Project Page URL Structure
Sometimes it’s nice to preview your Jekyll site before you push your gh-pages
branch to GitHub. The subdirectory-like URL structure GitHub uses for
Project Pages complicates the proper resolution of URLs. In order to assure your
site builds properly, use the handy URL filters:
<!-- For styles with static names... -->
<link href="{{ 'assets/css/style.css' | relative_url }}" rel="stylesheet">
<!-- For documents/pages whose URLs can change... -->
[{{ page.title }}]("{{ page.url | relative_url }}")
This way you can preview your site locally from the site root on localhost,
but when GitHub generates your pages from the gh-pages branch all the URLs
will resolve properly.
Deploying Jekyll to GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages work by looking at certain branches of repositories on GitHub. There are two basic types available: user/organization and project pages. The way to deploy these two types of sites are nearly identical, except for a few minor details.
User and Organization Pages
User and organization pages live in a special GitHub repository dedicated to
only the GitHub Pages files. This repository must be named after the account
name. For example, @mojombo’s user page repository has the name
mojombo.github.io.
Content from the master branch of your repository will be used to build and
publish the GitHub Pages site, so make sure your Jekyll site is stored there.
Custom domains do not affect repository names
GitHub Pages are initially configured to live under the
username.github.io subdomain, which is why repositories must
be named this way even if a custom domain is being used.
Project Pages
Unlike user and organization Pages, Project Pages are kept in the same
repository as the project they are for, except that the website content is
stored in a specially named gh-pages branch or in a docs folder on the
master branch. The content will be rendered using Jekyll, and the output
will become available under a subpath of your user pages subdomain, such as
username.github.io/project (unless a custom domain is specified).
The Jekyll project repository itself is a perfect example of this branch structure—the master branch contains the actual software project for Jekyll, and the Jekyll website that you’re looking at right now is contained in the docs folder of the same repository.
Please refer to GitHub official documentation on user, organization and project pages to see more detailed examples.
Source files must be in the root directory
GitHub Pages overrides the “Site Source” configuration value, so if you locate your files anywhere other than the root directory, your site may not build correctly.
Installing the github-pages gem on Windows
While Windows is not officially supported, it is possible
to install the github-pages gem on Windows.
Special instructions can be found on our
Windows-specific docs page.