7 ms·

How to host and manage static sites (of unlimited size) for free on Github

90 points by maxogden 14y ago

kecebongsoft 14y ago
I had a problem with Github user pages for the past few months: It stopped building. At first I was more than happy that for every commits, I can see the changes immediately, but after few days, it just keep showing the old build. I even started a fresh new accounts and setup a new user page, same thing happened. I tried many things to make it work, adding/removing CNAME, changing the page content, even waiting for few days, no luck. Tried to contact the Github team (via Twitter and the Contact Us page), no respond. Now I am using my shared VPS to host a static site, waiting for some good news about build reliability, until then I wouldn't recommend using Github user pages. Oh and by the way, if you set a CNAME, you wouldn't be able to access your project pages without adding it as a submodule into your user page.
- pyre 14y ago
  I put up a static page a couple of weeks ago with no issue. Granted, I'm not using Jekyll and just generating the static files on my own locally before committing / pushing.
  - kecebongsoft 14y ago
    I'm using Pelican as a static blog engine, had no issue at first, this happened after the number of commit grow.
- maxogden 14y ago
  wow very weird, I haven't had any issues like this
  - n8ji 14y ago
    Hmm, strange symptoms. I haven't any issues like this. I've been using github pages + CNAME + gh-pages as project pages together for over a year without any issues whatsoever. Didn't have to worry about submodules either. Not sure why you're into these issues, kecebongsoft. I've used Jekyll as well as plain old html. I'm sorry you've had issues like this but I wouldn't discourage people from trying it either.
nvr219 14y ago
I miss Geocities
- simonsarris 14y ago
  You know what? Me too. I miss Geocities and I never realized until just now. That was a great internet. The people's internet. I was 13 years old but I was allowed to make a website for free, with no help or direction from parents or teachers or anyone, with barely anything to learn. And when I was done it was there. It was a thing I made on the internet and I could show anyone. And I did, and it was probably embarrassingly bad, but that's not the point. I think more than anything in my career, services like Geocities inspired me. See the internet? You can make it. You can do this stuff. It's not that hard. Nobody else in my life told me that. Nobody explained to me that creating things on a computer wasn't magic, and if I wasn't enticed with such an easy website creator I may have never known. What do I give my kids? What do I give my little cousins, right now, at the age of 10, that even comes close? --- Looking around there seem to be a few, but they're all so template-centric that I wonder if I'd feel the same way if I had them back then.
  - dhotson 14y ago
    I think "view source" is one of the best features in web browsers. It's nice that anyone can peek behind the curtains and see that web pages aren't magic.
  - oceanic 14y ago
    I wish I could upvote this comment more than once. I remember getting on Geocities in 1996 and finding a burgeoning community, full of randomness and fun, all learning as we went along about how build websites. I remember mine was in the “Bourbon Street” “neighbourhood”. I had a lot of fun that year, messing about on IRC, learning HTML, building (ugly :-) websites, helping others do the same. Can't believe I sound nostalgic about that place. I think I'll set up my daughter (nearly 9, already has her own domain) with a GitHub account, and set up Pages so she can play with HTML, CSS and stuff.
    - 14y ago
simon_weber 14y ago
Github pages is a fantastic service. I use it as an automatic archive for a daily mailing list: https://github.com/simon-weber/the-listserve-archive https://github.com/simon-weber/the-listserve-archive. Basically, Github is my free host, database and api.
nthitz 14y ago
I wonder if people start abusing this if Github were to put any restrictions on it somehow. For quick one off single page things sure why not, but if people start trying to host huge websites on Github? I'd be curious as to their response.
- activepeanut 14y ago
  Yeah, this is ripe for abuse by pornographers. :(
  - nthitz 14y ago
    Really? Care to expand? That just surprises me!
    - apricot13 14y ago
      I'd imagine the bandwidth for a porn site is huge, imagine having all that bandwidth dealt with by someone else for free! plus the porn industry tends to get in on new technologies early so Id be surprised if there isn't some somewhere. Unrelated to porn this sort of thing could be great in general as all the content is searchable it would be a goldmine for information on how to use a function or do some specific action. I already use git as a codex of sorts!
  - eli 14y ago
    We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Service. and If your bandwidth usage significantly exceeds the average bandwidth usage (as determined solely by GitHub) of other GitHub customers, we reserve the right to immediately disable your account or throttle your file hosting until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption. I wouldn't worry too much about it. https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service
- derleth 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
redidas 14y ago
Is the ability to use custom domains free now? In the past I thought you had to be under one of the paid github plans. Oddly enough, I don't see any mention of this in the github article explaining how to set up a custom domain: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-pages https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-...
- pearkes 14y ago
  In the root of your repo on the gh-pages branch: echo example.com > CNAME Then point it (if apex) at 207.97.227.245.
- rsenk330 14y ago
  I've been using a custom domain (for free) for over a year now. Really cool for simple static sites.
jimmytttt 14y ago
What it isn't: a dynamic host -- so it can't do PHP/Rails/Node etc. Seems like a good opportunity for sever-less folks like WebScript.io or Firebase to jump in and help.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
nodrew 14y ago
You can also create a static file blog with Jekyll https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll. Pretty awesome and simple.
hunvreus 14y ago
Great for hosting documentation, blogs, brochure sites or simple static clients: push your API code on master and other branches and have your static client to consume from the API on the gh-pages branch. Be careful though, if you push something on gh-pages it will be public, even if your repo is private. From what the guys at Github told me, they don't have to restrict their users as long as you don't commit obvious abuses. Either very large files or gigantic amount of files, which will both create issues with Git. In short, "don't be a dick".
nnq 14y ago
...if you give something for free and don't set limits, people will find ways to abuse it ...and then you'll have limits for everyone ...I ask all web developers out there to not use Github pages for clients' websites, it's not like you don't have room in the budget for almost-free webhosting for static websites, it's probably something like 0.(...)1% of website maintenance and dev costs and there already are free blog hosting services. use github for your website/blog, you family's, your pet's, but not for your clients', please...
- jwdunne 14y ago
  A lot of clients are actually willing to pay for you to host their site, just as long as they don't have to do anything technical. We're talking £350 for a year in a lot of cases and the site could simply be an addon domain on a package with a few sites on it. This also includes a walk through of setting up emails on Outlook, iPhone or what have you. They just don't care because you end up doing something that takes you 5 minutes and little to no energy which would be next to impossible for them. Since the margins are so high, you also have freedom to make nice discounts without a loss.
reidrac 14y ago
OT, but I'd love to know what HN think about this: The license part of the README.md says "The content in this repo is BSD licensed". AFAIK licensing requires: - A copyright line with the year (or years) and the name of the copyright holder. - IIRC a way to contact the copyright holder is required (email, URL, etc), but I may be wrong and it's just optional. - A copy of the license grant/notice is required, ie. the "boilerplate notice" form Apache license that includes a link to the full license text. In this case, does the "The content in this repo is BSD licensed" sentence have any kind of effect? EDIT: ate a word, formatting
- advisedwang 14y ago
  (IANAL, most familiar with UK rules) Generally a author has copyright over their works without having to explicitly says so. Saying "Copyright (c) YYYY AUTHOR NAME" is just a way of asserting it to remove potential confusion or ambiguity. With no licensing, there is no right to use a copyright work (except fair use). BSD licensing a work is granting permission is a set of circumstances, not revoking permission. Thus if a license is not correctly applied the work cannot be used, rather than the inverse. As for "The content in this repo is BSD licensed" - the usual licensing wording is again a convention designed to be as clear as possible, but the wording applied there probably counts as it pretty clearly intends to give permission. The "probably" is why people ought to stick to known and understood conventions.
aGHz 14y ago
Seems like a good place to link to "Poll: What's your favorite static site generator?"[1] submitted a few days ago. The most interesting notion to take away is that, for all the buzz surrounding static site generators like Jekyll and Pelican, you can actually accomplish the same goal using absolutely any backend you're comfortable with. As long as your output doesn't contain anything dynamic, you can even use frameworks like Django or Rails then pair this with a spider (e.g. wget) to pull all the dynamically-_generated_ output into a static snapshot that you then upload to GitHub. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473
nachteilig 14y ago
Does one have to make the _yourusername_.github.com repo first for this to work? My understanding is that the Pages feature is only activated by doing this.

90 points by maxogden 14y ago

I had a problem with Github user pages for the past few months: It stopped building. At first I was more than happy that for every commits, I can see the changes immediately, but after few days, it just keep showing the old build. I even started a fresh new accounts and setup a new user page, same thing happened. I tried many things to make it work, adding/removing CNAME, changing the page content, even waiting for few days, no luck. Tried to contact the Github team (via Twitter and the Contact Us page), no respond. Now I am using my shared VPS to host a static site, waiting for some good news about build reliability, until then I wouldn't recommend using Github user pages. Oh and by the way, if you set a CNAME, you wouldn't be able to access your project pages without adding it as a submodule into your user page.

pyre 14y ago
I put up a static page a couple of weeks ago with no issue. Granted, I'm not using Jekyll and just generating the static files on my own locally before committing / pushing.
- kecebongsoft 14y ago
  I'm using Pelican as a static blog engine, had no issue at first, this happened after the number of commit grow.
maxogden 14y ago
wow very weird, I haven't had any issues like this
- n8ji 14y ago
  Hmm, strange symptoms. I haven't any issues like this. I've been using github pages + CNAME + gh-pages as project pages together for over a year without any issues whatsoever. Didn't have to worry about submodules either. Not sure why you're into these issues, kecebongsoft. I've used Jekyll as well as plain old html. I'm sorry you've had issues like this but I wouldn't discourage people from trying it either.

nvr219 14y ago

I miss Geocities

simonsarris 14y ago
You know what? Me too. I miss Geocities and I never realized until just now. That was a great internet. The people's internet. I was 13 years old but I was allowed to make a website for free, with no help or direction from parents or teachers or anyone, with barely anything to learn. And when I was done it was there. It was a thing I made on the internet and I could show anyone. And I did, and it was probably embarrassingly bad, but that's not the point. I think more than anything in my career, services like Geocities inspired me. See the internet? You can make it. You can do this stuff. It's not that hard. Nobody else in my life told me that. Nobody explained to me that creating things on a computer wasn't magic, and if I wasn't enticed with such an easy website creator I may have never known. What do I give my kids? What do I give my little cousins, right now, at the age of 10, that even comes close? --- Looking around there seem to be a few, but they're all so template-centric that I wonder if I'd feel the same way if I had them back then.
- dhotson 14y ago
  I think "view source" is one of the best features in web browsers. It's nice that anyone can peek behind the curtains and see that web pages aren't magic.
- oceanic 14y ago
  I wish I could upvote this comment more than once. I remember getting on Geocities in 1996 and finding a burgeoning community, full of randomness and fun, all learning as we went along about how build websites. I remember mine was in the “Bourbon Street” “neighbourhood”. I had a lot of fun that year, messing about on IRC, learning HTML, building (ugly :-) websites, helping others do the same. Can't believe I sound nostalgic about that place. I think I'll set up my daughter (nearly 9, already has her own domain) with a GitHub account, and set up Pages so she can play with HTML, CSS and stuff.
  - 14y ago

simon_weber 14y ago

Github pages is a fantastic service. I use it as an automatic archive for a daily mailing list: https://github.com/simon-weber/the-listserve-archive https://github.com/simon-weber/the-listserve-archive. Basically, Github is my free host, database and api.

nthitz 14y ago

I wonder if people start abusing this if Github were to put any restrictions on it somehow. For quick one off single page things sure why not, but if people start trying to host huge websites on Github? I'd be curious as to their response.

activepeanut 14y ago
Yeah, this is ripe for abuse by pornographers. :(
- nthitz 14y ago
  Really? Care to expand? That just surprises me!
  - apricot13 14y ago
    I'd imagine the bandwidth for a porn site is huge, imagine having all that bandwidth dealt with by someone else for free! plus the porn industry tends to get in on new technologies early so Id be surprised if there isn't some somewhere. Unrelated to porn this sort of thing could be great in general as all the content is searchable it would be a goldmine for information on how to use a function or do some specific action. I already use git as a codex of sorts!
- eli 14y ago
  We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Service. and If your bandwidth usage significantly exceeds the average bandwidth usage (as determined solely by GitHub) of other GitHub customers, we reserve the right to immediately disable your account or throttle your file hosting until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption. I wouldn't worry too much about it. https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service
derleth 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

redidas 14y ago

Is the ability to use custom domains free now? In the past I thought you had to be under one of the paid github plans. Oddly enough, I don't see any mention of this in the github article explaining how to set up a custom domain: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-pages https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-...

pearkes 14y ago
In the root of your repo on the gh-pages branch: echo example.com > CNAME Then point it (if apex) at 207.97.227.245.
rsenk330 14y ago
I've been using a custom domain (for free) for over a year now. Really cool for simple static sites.

jimmytttt 14y ago

What it isn't: a dynamic host -- so it can't do PHP/Rails/Node etc. Seems like a good opportunity for sever-less folks like WebScript.io or Firebase to jump in and help.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

nodrew 14y ago

You can also create a static file blog with Jekyll https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll. Pretty awesome and simple.

hunvreus 14y ago

Great for hosting documentation, blogs, brochure sites or simple static clients: push your API code on master and other branches and have your static client to consume from the API on the gh-pages branch. Be careful though, if you push something on gh-pages it will be public, even if your repo is private. From what the guys at Github told me, they don't have to restrict their users as long as you don't commit obvious abuses. Either very large files or gigantic amount of files, which will both create issues with Git. In short, "don't be a dick".

nnq 14y ago

...if you give something for free and don't set limits, people will find ways to abuse it ...and then you'll have limits for everyone ...I ask all web developers out there to not use Github pages for clients' websites, it's not like you don't have room in the budget for almost-free webhosting for static websites, it's probably something like 0.(...)1% of website maintenance and dev costs and there already are free blog hosting services. use github for your website/blog, you family's, your pet's, but not for your clients', please...

jwdunne 14y ago
A lot of clients are actually willing to pay for you to host their site, just as long as they don't have to do anything technical. We're talking £350 for a year in a lot of cases and the site could simply be an addon domain on a package with a few sites on it. This also includes a walk through of setting up emails on Outlook, iPhone or what have you. They just don't care because you end up doing something that takes you 5 minutes and little to no energy which would be next to impossible for them. Since the margins are so high, you also have freedom to make nice discounts without a loss.

reidrac 14y ago

OT, but I'd love to know what HN think about this: The license part of the README.md says "The content in this repo is BSD licensed". AFAIK licensing requires: - A copyright line with the year (or years) and the name of the copyright holder. - IIRC a way to contact the copyright holder is required (email, URL, etc), but I may be wrong and it's just optional. - A copy of the license grant/notice is required, ie. the "boilerplate notice" form Apache license that includes a link to the full license text. In this case, does the "The content in this repo is BSD licensed" sentence have any kind of effect? EDIT: ate a word, formatting

advisedwang 14y ago
(IANAL, most familiar with UK rules) Generally a author has copyright over their works without having to explicitly says so. Saying "Copyright (c) YYYY AUTHOR NAME" is just a way of asserting it to remove potential confusion or ambiguity. With no licensing, there is no right to use a copyright work (except fair use). BSD licensing a work is granting permission is a set of circumstances, not revoking permission. Thus if a license is not correctly applied the work cannot be used, rather than the inverse. As for "The content in this repo is BSD licensed" - the usual licensing wording is again a convention designed to be as clear as possible, but the wording applied there probably counts as it pretty clearly intends to give permission. The "probably" is why people ought to stick to known and understood conventions.

aGHz 14y ago

Seems like a good place to link to "Poll: What's your favorite static site generator?"[1] submitted a few days ago. The most interesting notion to take away is that, for all the buzz surrounding static site generators like Jekyll and Pelican, you can actually accomplish the same goal using absolutely any backend you're comfortable with. As long as your output doesn't contain anything dynamic, you can even use frameworks like Django or Rails then pair this with a spider (e.g. wget) to pull all the dynamically-_generated_ output into a static snapshot that you then upload to GitHub. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473

nachteilig 14y ago

Does one have to make the _yourusername_.github.com repo first for this to work? My understanding is that the Pages feature is only activated by doing this.