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Learn `GitHub Pages`

Learn how to use GitHub Pages to publish your website! It's easy, free and you have precise (version) control over your content!

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What? Why? 📄

So you've built your website using X framework. And you want to share it with your friends! You've probably seen many cloud services that provide you with a way to host your site for free - Netlify, Firebase, Surge or even AWS!

Even though some options are free, others aren't. Regardless, using has many advantages and it's extremely practical if you're already developing your website on this platform.

So why should you use Github Pages? It's a great way to communicate with like-minded people by showcasing your projects, thus contributing to the Open-Source community.

It's free. This goes without explanation.
Custom domain support. By default, sites deployed on Github Pages are deployed to https://<your_account_name>.github.io/<repo_name>. But you can buy a domain for yourself and use it for yourself!
HTTPS support. If you've ever deployed a website on-premises, you may know that getting a certificate so your website runs on HTTPS is a cumbersome process. With Github Pages, you can enforce HTTPS with a click of a button!

It's seamless. By setting up a simple Github Action pipeline, you can have your CI being deployed automatically!
Jekyll automatically supported. Jekyll is a Ruby-based site generator which will create HTML and serve our files for us.

Note

It's essential to be "crystal clear" about this: Microsoft OWNS GitHub. 😢 Therefore using GitHub Pages as a publishing tool means you are trusting Microsoft to:

a) Keep your data and privacy safe.

b) Not censor or hide your content because they disagree with your views/beliefs.

We have no reason to suspect/believe that Microsoft is going to delete/censor our content and given that we can store a complete copy of our data in a "safe place" using dwyl/github-backup, we feel the risk is acceptable.

Who? 🧍‍♂️

This guide is meant as both an internal reference for us at @dwyl and a fully Open Source resource that anyone can read and learn from.

Publishing sites publicly is in the interest of everyone. And that should include you!

How? 💻

Luckily for you, integrating a deployment pipeline to your repo to Github Pages is fairly simple! It's one of the perks of using it!

Github Pages needs a source to pull the files from. This can be a specific folder in a given branch of the repo.

Regardless, once we set the branch and the folder, Github Pages will perform a Github Action to deploy to the default domain - https://<your_account_name>.github.io/<repo_name> (you can change the domain to a custom one).

Take a look at the picture below. This action is automatically executed after hitting the Save button on the Settings > Pages page of the repository. In this case, we are using the root files in the gh-pages branch to be served as the website.

Automating this process

Depending on the framework/language you are using, you can simply create a release bundle and manually upload it to the repo on a different branch and have it served in a Github Page. However, this process is time inefficient. We could (and should!) leverage Github Actions to automatically build and deploy our website to Github Pages.

You can check the quickstart guide for Github Actions in https://docs.github.com/en/actions/quickstart.

But, in layman's terms, you need to have a .github/workflows directory in your repo, and create *.yml files within it. Each of these files will pertain to the configuration of the workflow(s) that will be executed.

Here's a practical example of a Github Action workflow file to deploy to Github Pages.

name: deploy to Github Pages
on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]


permissions:
  contents: write
jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      
      - name: Install Flutter
        uses: subosito/flutter-action@v2
        with:
          channel: 'stable'

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: flutter pub get

      # See stackoverflow.com/questions/74164386/flutter-web-shows-blank-page-on-github-deployment.
      - name: Install and Build 
        run: flutter build web --release --web-renderer html

      - name: Deploy to Github Pages
        uses: JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@v4
        with:
          branch: gh-pages # The branch the action should deploy to.
          folder: ./build/web # The folder the action should deploy.

Note

This code is originally from dwyl/app. We highly encourage you to check it out, and see the actions be executed! 😄

Let's break the code down.

This workflow is only executed when a push commit is made to the main branch, and has permissions to write on the repo.

A job called "build-and-deploy" is run on an ubuntu container, and has several steps.

the code is checked out (copied) from the repo into the container.
since the project is Flutter-based, we need to install Flutter and fetch the dependencies. This is made by using the subosito/flutter-action@v2 to install Flutter and running flutter pub get to download the dependencies.
we create the release bundle by running flutter build web --release --web-renderer html. This will create the bundle inside build/dev.
finally, we make use of the JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@v4 action to automatically deploy the website to GithubPages. It pushes and deploys the code found in ./build/web (the generated release bundle) from the gh-pages branch.

And that's it! You are using the JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@v4, which will do all the heavy lifting for you! You just need to tell it which branch you want to serve the files from and which repo folder it needs to pull the release bundle from.

If you check the gh-pages branch (it doesn't need to be created prior to running the action, it will create it by default if it's not found), you will see that the files are automatically pushed to this branch and all ready to be served by Github Pages!

Star the repo!

As always, if you find it helpful/useful please star the repo on GitHub ⭐ 🙏. If you get stuck or have any questions/suggestions, please open an issue.