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

https://github.com/maxogden/gh-pages-template

by maxogden • 14 years ago

90 32 14 years 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.

pyre2• 14 years 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.

kecebongsoft2• 14 years ago

I'm using Pelican as a static blog engine, had no issue at first, this happened after the number of commit grow.

maxogden• 14 years ago

wow very weird, I haven't had any issues like this

n8ji• 14 years 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.

nvr2192• 14 years ago

I miss Geocities

simonsarris• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

Legion• 14 years ago

Something has been lost in the evolution from home pages to Facebook and Twitter. The creation part of the equation has been reduced down to nothing more than choosing a picture to stick in a predefined slot.

I miss when people I know used LiveJournal. LJ encouraged people to write, long form. Then came MySpace and the birth of the status update, which was on even ground with the blog feature. Then Facebook banished blogging to the "Notes" area that nobody ever read, while elevating the status update to the central communication channel. Then, of course, Twitter boiled it down to nothing but status updates.

I miss when more average Internet users made home pages. I miss when more of them blogged, and participated in communities that revolved around the blog format rather than status updates.

pyre2• 14 years ago

  > Then, of course, Twitter boiled it down to nothing
  > but status updates.

IIRC, Facebook copied the 'status updates / news feed' idea from Twitter.

simon_weber• 14 years 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.

Basically, Github is my free host, database and api.

nthitz2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Yeah, this is ripe for abuse by pornographers. :(

nthitz2• 14 years ago

Really? Care to expand? That just surprises me!

eli• 14 years 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

derleth• 14 years ago

> I wonder if people start abusing this if Github were to put any restrictions on it somehow.

They'll have to restrict it to some extent, but neither is it 1995 anymore. GeoCities was able to make a go of 15MB per free website (with bandwidth caps) for 14 years (1995-2009), and it's still available in Japan, but I don't know the current terms.

Serving static content you don't pay for from storage you already own down pipes you already pay for is just about the cheapest way there is to be online by any metric. I wouldn't be surprised if they could support a fairly large number of websites without blinking.

redidas• 14 years 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-...

pearkes• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

I've been using a custom domain (for free) for over a year now. Really cool for simple static sites.

jimmytttt• 14 years 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.

nodrew• 14 years ago

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

Pretty awesome and simple.

hunvreus• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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

nachteilig• 14 years 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.

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

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