GitHub has a great feature called GitHub Pages where they’ll vend your static files via http. It’s the best deal in town.

All you need to do is have a branch named gh-pages and perhaps push a button to engage the feature the first time you use it for a given repo.

Sometimes a project is nothing but a jumble of files that should be accessed via http, so having a master branch along with a gh-pages branch is just needless complexity.

Fortunately, it’s easy to create a Github project that consists solely of a gh-pages branch. No fuss, no master muss.

Here’s how I did it:

• Create a new Github repository

• Create a local repo:

  mkdir JSRegexTeststand
  cd JSRegexTeststand
  git init
  bbedit index.html
  git add index.html 
  git ci -m 'initial commit'
  

• Now we have a master branch hosting one commit. The trick is to rename master to gh-pages:

  git branch -m master gh-pages
  

• With our branch rename in place, we can push our lone branch to GitHub:

  git remote add origin git@github.com:rentzsch/JSRegexTeststand.git
  git push origin gh-pages
  

If all went as planned, your files should now be live at http://$username.github.com/$reponame/.

I noticed I didn’t have to manually click Admin -> GitHub Page: Generate Your Project Page link as mentioned in the documentation. I think GitHub now automatically generates your pages when upon receiving a gh-pages branch but they haven’t updated the docs yet.

git github Apr 7 2010