- Setup your DNS
- Brochureware websites
- Customizing your blog
- Free hosting on github
- Getting started with github pages
- Next steps
- Notes
- Resources
- Scaling, unlimited scaling
- Setting up cloudflare ssl
- Single-page applications
- Ssl and cloudflare
- Summary, confession, and links
- Takeaways
- Using jekyll with github pages
- What is jekyll?
- Why cloudflare?
- Преимущества создания сайта на github
- Этап второй: создаем репозиторий
Setup your DNS
Edit: Ignore this section and use CloudFlare instead. It’s free, it’s a DNS, It’s also a CDN, and it’s also easier.
I use FreeDNS, cause it’s free, and doesn’t look too dodgy.
Brochureware websites
Brochureware websites are meant to provide information about a business, and don’t change significantly throughout their life. A dynamic application is clearly overkill for such sites, and since these sites go unmaintained for years, receiving few, if any updates, they’re usually easy targets for hackers to, well, hack.
Static HTML templates are significantly cheaper than their CMS counterparts, and they are easier to tweak in the future. Developers asked to update such sites don’t require specialized knowledge about a particular CMS. As a rule, I always make static websites for brochureware sites.
Customizing your blog
We’ve only begun to scratch the surface with Jekyll’s blog aware functionality. This guide is only going to cover a couple more steps you might want to take for your blog.
You may have noticed that the URL of your blog post does not include the blog directory in it. In Jekyll we can control the structure of our permalinks by editing the _config.yml file we created in Step 8. So let’s change our permalink structure to include the blog directory.
14 Edit the _config.yml file. Add the following line at the end of the file:
permalink: /blog/:year/:month/:day/:title
Free hosting on github
This guide will take you from zero webserver knowledge, to having your own free site hosted on GitHub. The only non-free bit is registering a domain name, which can be as cheap as $5/year.
This guide uses CrazyDomains as the Registrar, FreeDNS as the DNS, and GitHub as the Webserver.
Getting started with github pages
Don’t worry if some of these concepts are still a little fuzzy to you. The best way to learn this stuff is to just start doing the work, so let’s not waste anymore time and dive right in.
Next steps
Hopefully this guide has given you the confidence to do many other things with Git, GitHub, Jekyll, and your website or blog. You could go in many different directions at this point, as I’m sure you’ve already started thinking about, but here are a few other things I think would be worth your time:
Notes
1. Somasundaram, R. (2022). Git: Version Control for Everyone (pp. 9-17). Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing.
Resources
I’ll try to keep this list current and up to date. If you know of a great resource you’d like to share or notice a broken link, please get in touch.
Scaling, unlimited scaling
The ideas presented in this article are not limited to free web hosting of small applications.
You can build a front-end layer based on a modern JavaScript framework, hook it up to a large scale cloud-based Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), like Firebase, and create complex applications without worrying about servers, uptime, or any other infrastructure related issue.
Making a new exciting web based game?! Check out GameSparks, and you are good to go.
Using Github Pages as a «standard» hosting service, that is expected to handle high bandwidth websites, is discouraged and should not be done. Adding Cloudflare CDN on top of GitHub Pages makes this solution work. Cloudflare is much more than a free SSL service. It’s a company with a global CDN that protects your website from surges and keeps the load on GitHub pages minimized.
Setting up cloudflare ssl
Let’s get our hands dirty again. The first thing to do, switch to routing all of your traffic through Cloudflare:
Next, under Crypto, set the SSL level to “Full.”
Single-page applications
Are you showing off a wonderful, cool new app that relies on modern front-end frameworks?
Your application is already mostly static. Take a few extra steps to isolate any server side logic into a separate application, and get the full benefit of having your app served entirely from Cloudflare’s cache.
Your application will be available at all times.
Ssl and cloudflare
Welcome to the post-Snowden era. All our worst fears of government-sanctioned snooping and hacking have been confirmed, and the world is scrambling to secure data in transit and at rest.
Summary, confession, and links
In this article, I made it appear as though I manually published my React app to gh-pages. I did no such thing. I worked on master and when it came time to deploy, I ran npm run deploy which kicked off a build script and pushed the build to gh-pages. Please see the master branch of my repository to see how it works.
Takeaways
Pros:
- Instant deployment
- Easy collaboration
- Secure hosting environment
Caveats:
Links:
Using jekyll with github pages
Like GitHub Pages, Jekyll is self-aware, so if you add folders and files following specific naming conventions, when you commit to GitHub, Jekyll will magically build your website.
While I recommend setting up Jekyll on your own computer so you can edit and preview your site locally, and when ready, push those changes to your GitHub repo, we’re not going to do that. Instead, to quickly get a handle on how Jekyll works, we’re going to build it into our GitHub repo using the GitHub web interface.
What is jekyll?
Jekyll is a very powerful static site generator. In some senses, it is a throwback to the days of static HTML before databases were used to store website content. For simple sites without complex architectures, like a personal website, this is a huge plus.
Jekyll makes managing your website easier because it depends on templates. Templates (or layouts in Jekyll nomenclature) are your best friend when using a static site generator. Instead of repeating the same navigation markup on every page I create, which I’d have to edit on every page if I add, remove, or change the location of navigation item, I can create what Jekyll calls a layout that gets used on all my pages. In this tutorial, we’re going to create two Jekyll templates to help power your website.
Why cloudflare?
I know what you’re thinking: Gilani, you just told me how awesome Let’s Encrypt is. Why are you talking about Cloudflare? Well, it all comes down to simplicity.
Преимущества создания сайта на github
При работе с хостингом от Github, можно сразу отметить несколько существенных преимуществ:
- Вам не потребуется покупать и ежегодно оплачивать домен;
- Вам не потребуется вносить ежемесячный платеж на оплату хостинга;
- Вы сможете сразу продемонстрировать свою работу клиентам;
- Многие веб-разработчики и заказчики, которые не по наслышке знают о github, с уважением отнесутся к вам, увидев в конце популярное «github.io».
Этап второй: создаем репозиторий
После регистрации вы попадете на стартовую страницу. Чтобы начать проект, необходимо кликнуть на Start a project.
И Вас сразу перекинет на страницу по созданию репозитория. Настройки просты: достаточно ввести имя репозитория (имя будущего домена), в нашем случае это tpvesrtak.github.io, установаем галочку около «Initialize this repository with a README» и жмём Create repository. Description заполнять не обязательно.
Все, репозиторий создан.