Easy Web Publishing With Github

A quick note I’ve been meaning to post for ages… If you need some simple web hosting, you can use Github: simply create a top level docs folder in your repo and pop the files you want to serve in that directory.

And the easiest way to create that folder? In a repo web page, click the Create New File button, and use the filename docs/index.md to create the docs folder and add a web homepage to it as a markdown file.

(And to create a Github repo, if it’s your first time? Get a Github account, click on the “Create New Repository” or “Add New Repository” or a big “+” button somewhere and create a new repo, checking the box to automatically create an empty README file automatically to get the repo going. (If you forget to do that that, don’t panic – you should still be able to create a new file somewhere from the repo webpage to get the repo going…)

To serve the contents of the docs folder as a mini-website, click on the repo Settings button:

then scroll down to the Github Pages area, and select as a source master branch/docs folder.

When you save it, wait a minute or two for it to spin up, and then you should be able to see your website published at https://YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io/YOUR_REPO_NAME.

For example, the files in the docs folder of  the default master branch of my Github psychemedia/parlihacks repository are rendered here: https://psychemedia.github.io/parlihacks/.

If you have files on you  desktop you want to publish to the web, click on the docs folder on the Github repo webpage to list the contents of that directory, and simply drag the files from your desktop onto the page, then click the Commit changes button to upload them. If there are any files with the same name in the directory, the new file will be checked in as an updated version of the file, and you should be able to compare the differences to the previous version…

PS Github can be scary at times, but the web UI makes a lot of simple git interactions easy. See here for some examples – A Quick Look at Github Classroom and a Note on How Easy Github on the Web Is To Use… – such as editing files directly in Github viewed in your browser, or dragging and dropping files from your desktop onto the a Github repo web page to check in an update to a file.