1. Create a Github Account

Go to github.com and sign up for a free account.

2. Create a New Repository

There are two kinds of Github Pages sites: user and project. A user site is a personal website that is associated with your Github account, while a project site is associated with a specific repository. To create a new repository, click the “+” icon in the top right corner of the Github homepage and select “New repository”. Give your repository a name and select “Public” for visibility. You can also choose to initialize the repository with a README file.

  • If you name your repository <username>.github.io, it will be a user site.
  • If you name your repository anything else, it will be a project site.

A user site has a URL like:

https://ericbusboom.github.io

A project site has a URL like:

https://league-curriculum.github.io/Portfolio-jekyll-barebones/

3. Creating Your Website

For the next few steps, we will follow the Github Pages Quickstart guide.

  1. In the upper-right corner of any page on Github, select the new repository button, then click New Repository.

  2. Enter username.github.io as the repository name. Replace username with your Github username. For example, if your username is octocat, the repository name should be octocat.github.io.

  3. Choose a repository visibility. For more information, see About Repositories.

  4. Select Initialize This Repository With a README.

  5. Click Create Repository.

  6. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the “Settings” tab, select the ⋯ dropdown menu, then click Settings.

  7. In the “Code and Automation” section of the sidebar, click Pages.

  8. Under “Build and Deployment”, under “Source”, select Deploy From a Branch.

  9. Under “Build and Deployment”, under “Branch”, use the branch dropdown menu and select a publishing source.

  10. Optionally, open the README.md file of your repository. The README.md file is where you will write the content for your site. You can edit the file or keep the default content for now.

  11. Visit username.github.io to view your new website. Note that it can take up to 10 minutes for changes to your site to publish after you push the changes to Github.

4. Yea! Check your New Site!

If you do no other configuration, you will see a simple page with the title of your repository and a link to the README file. You can edit the README file to add

5. Changing the Title and Description

By default, the title of your site is username.github.io. You can change the title by editing the _config.yml file in your repository. You can also add a description for your site.

  1. Click the Code tab of your repository.

  2. In the file list, click _config.yml to open the file.

  3. Click the ✏️ (edit) icon to edit the file.

  4. The _config.yml file already contains a line that specifies the theme for your site. Add a new line with title: followed by the title you want. Add a new line with description: followed by the description you want. For example:

    theme: jekyll-theme-minimal
title: Octocat's Homepage
description: Bookmark this to keep an eye on my project updates!

6. Local Editing

You can run Jekyll locally on your computer to preview changes before pushing them to Github. To do this, you need to install Ruby and Jekyll on your computer. However, we have a codespace that is installed with Jekyll and Ruby. You can use the codespace to preview your changes before pushing them to Github. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Click the Code tab of your repository.
  2. Click the Code button and select Open with Codespaces.
  3. Click New codespace.
  4. Wait for the codespace to load.

  5. In the terminal, run the following command to start the Jekyll server:

    jekyll serve
  6. Open the ports tab on the bottom pane, and look for the port that is running on 4000. Click the Open in Browser button to view your site, to open a new browser tab, or select ** Preview** to open a preview pane in the codespace.
  7. Make changes to your site in the codespace, and refresh the browser tab to see the changes.

7. Commit and Publish

Once you are happy with your changes, you can commit them to your repository. Committing and pushing changes to your repository is the same as any other Github repository, and for a Github pages site, it will automatically publish the changes to your site.