GitHub pages especially useful for simple web tool projects —08 October 2012

One of the great features of GitHub is free hosting for your projects. All you have to do is put your web content in a branch named gh-pages and push the branch to GitHub.

This is especially useful for simple web tool projects that contain only html/js/css/images that are ready to use without any setup, that is, when the master branch is itself the web content. For example, your jquery plugin or a CSS framework. In this case generating or updating gh-pages is a matter of this simple two-liner:

git branch -f gh-pages
git push origin gh-pages

After a few minutes, the branch will be visible at the URL:

http://USERNAME.github.com/REPONAME/

Be careful: if you already have a gh-pages branch, the first command above will completely wipe it out. This script is useful really only when your master branch is itself the web content.

GitHub provides several ways to create beautiful web content. More details in the docs:

http://pages.github.com/