Building a Site with GitHub Pages and Custom Domains

📢 This article was translated by Gemini-3-flash

Introduction

I recently set up a personal page using GitHub Pages (it’s gone now), so here’s a quick guide on how to build a site and use a custom domain.

This post doesn’t cover complex site generators, since I basically just wrote a single Markdown file.

First, sign up for a GitHub account. Once logged in, create a new repository .

The Repository name should be username.github.io. For example, if my GitHub username is yexca, I would enter yexca.github.io.

On Windows, just download and run the installer from the official Git website.

After installation, open Git Bash and run the following commands:

1
2
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

Replace Your Name with your name and [email protected] with your email.

For example:

1
2
git config --global user.name "yexca"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

If you’re already familiar with Git (though if you were, why are you reading this?), you can skip this step.

Go to the GitHub Desktop website to download and install it.

Open GitHub Desktop, log in, and clone the repository you just created to a local folder.

The app will show the repository interface with some quick actions on the right.

App Interface

I use VS Code, so I’ll click “Open in Visual Studio Code”.

Create a README.md file and edit it using Markdown (shameless plug for my own Markdown notes).

Once edited and saved, go back to GitHub Desktop, click “Commit to main”, then click “Push origin”.

Now, visit username.github.io to see your site. (If it doesn’t show up immediately, give it a few minutes).

Go to your repository settings, find “Pages” on the left, enter your custom domain under “Custom domain”, and click “Save”.

Note: You can also choose a Jekyll theme here.

In your domain’s DNS settings, add a CNAME record pointing your domain to username.github.io, where username is your GitHub username.

For some reason, I couldn’t get HTTPS working directly through GitHub, so I used Cloudflare .

Enable the proxy in DNS settings, then under “SSL/TLS” > “Edge Certificates”, toggle on “Always Use HTTPS”.

Since I didn’t need a full blog, I just used a simple file. If you want a real blog, check out these tools: