TL;DR

  • We can learn about something new (GitHub Pages) and bring together other skills we’ve learned at the same time

Motivating use case: a simple website with GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a service provided by GitHub that will turn a GitHub repo into a static website. It’s used a lot for personal websites, project documentation, and other websites that don’t need heavy server-side software. We can use the stuff we’ve learned so far to very quickly and easily start working on a little website.

Skills we’ll exercise

  • Basic git workflow: git {clone, status, add, commit, push, pull, checkout, log}
  • Next steps with git: branch and merge and the .gitignore file
  • Basic shell navigation
  • Develop on a dev branch and merge to master when we’re ready
  • Let’s assume we already have our ssh keys set up

Out of scope: Docker, APIs, unit testing, logging

GitHub Pages

  • GitHub Pages is a web hosting service built into GitHub.
  • You can use it in three ways:
    • Generate the site from the master branch. The entire repo is used to generate the website.
    • Generate the site from the /docs folder of the master branch. Do this when you have project code with docs in the same repository.
    • Generate the site from the gh-pages branch. If you do this, you have a whole separate branch for generating the site.
  • We’ll just do the first here, so the entire repo is just used to create the site.