This weekend I’m trying out GitHub Pages with Jekyll to host a static site. Jekyll is a static website generator built on Ruby. What really interested me is how you can get free hosting for Jekyll sites on GitHub Pages.

There are a lot of existing guides about this topic, so I won’t bother to write a detailed one. Here is a simplified version of the steps I followed to get going with Jekyll on GitHub Pages.

  • installed Ruby and Jekyll
  • generated a Jekyll site and pushed it to my GitHub Pages repo
  • used Namecheap to register alexandersimes.com ($8 for a year)
  • set the Host Records in Namecheap to point to my GitHub Pages domain (tutorial)
  • set GitHub Pages up with a custom domain (tutorial)

Thats all! Took about 30 minutes to get it all working plus a bit of wait time for the DNS server to update.

So far, I am very impressed. Being able to test locally with a quick jekyll serve from a copy of my repo is great. Further, simply pushing to master on my repo triggers a build which updates my live site. I’m planning to spend some time looking at open source templates and integrating Google Analytics.

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