Blogging on GitHub Pages

About

https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#about-github-pages

GitHub Pages is a static site hosting service that takes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files straight from a repository on GitHub, optionally runs the files through a build process, and publishes a website. You can see examples of GitHub Pages sites in the GitHub Pages examples collection.
You can host your site on GitHub’s github.io domain or your own custom domain.

Getting started

• Decide on a static site generator. Reference: https://www.staticgen.com/
• Choose a template. Examples - Jekyll, Hugo, Pelican, GatsbyJS
• I chose Hydeout as:
  • GitHub Pages supports building Jekyll sites natively.
  • I wanted a simple website that is designed to last. Hyde fits the bill.
  • Hydeout is the still maintained fork of Hyde with some neat added features.
• Fork the repo to your GitHub account and change the repo name under settings to - <github_username>.github.io. This will be your blog’s URL.
• Now we can clone the repo locally and customise its looks as we desire.
• Add posts under the _posts directory in Markdown format. Guide to writing posts.
• Edit _config.yml to add your data.
• Commit and push your changes.
• Now GitHub will start building the site. You can check the status under Repository Settings > GitHub Pages.

Writing Posts

I use VSCode with Markdown All in One extension to write posts.

Local hosting for Development

While I was customising the looks of the website I felt a need of local hosting as it would be faster than pushing and waiting for GitHub to process the changes.
For this I found docker-github-pages to be excellent. The only issue is that you need to delete the Gemfile inside the repo to run the container. Note that without a Gemfile bundle exec command will not work.

• Run powershell.
• cd inside the repository.
• Run docker run -it --rm -v ${PWD}:/usr/src/app -p "4000:4000" starefossen/github-pages
• Site is live at http://127.0.0.1:4000/.