title | permalink |
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GitHub Pages |
/docs/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 in addition to supporting regular HTML
content, they’re also a great way to host your Jekyll-powered website for free.
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.
Sometimes it's nice to preview your Jekyll site before you push your gh-pages
branch to GitHub. However, 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 site.github.url
in your URL's.
{% raw %}
<!-- Useful for styles with static names... -->
<link href="{{ site.github.url }}/path/to/css.css" rel="stylesheet">
<!-- and for documents/pages whose URL's can change... -->
[{{ page.title }}]("{{ page.url | prepend: site.github.url }}")
{% endraw %}
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.
GitHub Pages work by looking at certain branches of repositories on GitHub. There are two basic types available: user/organization pages and project pages. The way to deploy these two types of sites are nearly identical, except for a few minor details.
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. To use the
currently-deployed version of the gem in your project, add the
following to your Gemfile
:
source 'https://rubygems.org'
require 'json'
require 'open-uri'
versions = JSON.parse(open('https://pages.github.com/versions.json').read)
gem 'github-pages', versions['github-pages']
This will ensure that when you run bundle install
, you
have the correct version of the github-pages
gem.
If that fails, simplify it:
source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'github-pages'
And be sure to run bundle update
often.
If you like to install pages-gem
on Windows you can find instructions by Jens Willmer on
how to install github-pages gem on Windows (x64).
While Windows is not officially supported, it is possible
to install github-pages
gem on Windows.
Special instructions can be found on our
Windows-specific docs page.
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.
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.
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]({{ site.repository }}) contains the actual software project for Jekyll, and the Jekyll website that you’re looking at right now is contained in the [docs folder]({{ site.repository }}/tree/master/docs) of the same repository.
Please refer to GitHub official documentation on user, organization and project pages to see more detailed examples.
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.
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.