Publish your code to a website

In this task, you’ll use a special feature of GitHub to publish your work to the web.

Now we’re going to publish your work to a website using GitHub Pages, so that you can demo your work. If you have a git branch called gh-pages in a repository that you have pushed to GitHub, GitHub will publish the static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for you at at <username>.github.io. You can use this for any static content, but not for applications that require a server.

Branches

In the terminal, change to your project folder and type

git branch

to see a list of your branches. You should see only one branch called master. Now create a new branch called gh-pages, like this:

git branch gh-pages

This tells git to make a new branch called gh-pages based on your current branch (which is master).

Now do git branch again. What do you see? Does git branch tell you which branch you are on?

To move into your new branch, type:

git checkout gh-pages

Any commits you make now will be on the gh-pages branch (and won’t show up on master). You’ll be using this branch to publish the work you are doing to GitHub Pages.

Publishing using GitHub Pages

To push this branch to GitHub type:

git push origin gh-pages

GitHub notices that you’ve pushed a branch called gh-pages, takes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and publishes it. This can take a minute or two. Your Playing-With-Matches work is now published at https://<username>.github.io/Playing-With-Matches.

After you’ve done this you should checkout the master branch again by doing:

git checkout master

Files we don’t need git to watch

Let’s learn a bit more about another part of git: ignoring files.