Introduction to GitHub User Pages - Part I

Setting up your own GitHub User Page

Many programmers, especially coders would like to showcase their awesome apps. It is a good practice to maintain a version control system for the code maintenance. One of the Open Source, Free, and Best VCS would be Git. It is supported in almost all the popular Operating Systems like Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, and almost all flavours of Linux.

GitHub is one of the popular web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. I know many of you would be aware of its working and have used it. One of my colleague, a heavy user of it, and a contributor too, hasn’t yet set up their GitHub Page yet! So, I guess there are many, like me, who is new to GitHub and struggling on creating a GitHub Page, for your username. Let’s see how we can do it here.

Getting inside GitHub

First thing you need is a GitHub Account. Navigate to GitHub: Let’s build from here · GitHub and create one, if you don’t have one. Others, please sign in with your credentials. For the new users, make sure you create a wise username, which will be coming like #-Link-Snipped-# and the page would be #-Link-Snipped-#.


Welcome to GitHub

This is the Welcome page of GitHub, when you first log in. You will find a lot of guides or tutorials on Setting up Git, Creating a Repository, Forking a Repository, and Being Social, as they are the main themes of having code on GitHub. So the first thing that we need to do is, creating a Repository.


Creating a Repository

A repository is a concept in Revision Control that refers to a storage on a server that runs a version control system. It has a set of files and directories, historical record of changes in the repository, a set of commit objects, and a set of references to commit objects, called heads.

To create a repository in GitHub, just scroll down the home page and you will see a widget with a title, Your Repositories. The value inside the braces is the count of repositories you have. Since most of us are new users, we would be having 0 in it. Click on New Repository button to start creating a new Repo.


Creating a Repository for your GitHub Page

To integrate your page with a repository, it should be in this name, username.github.com. Say my username is Praveen, so the new repository I am creating would be praveen.github.com. You can give a small description about the repo or just leave it empty. Make sure you have selected Public, so that, GitHub doesn’t charge for you! The checkbox near Initialize this repository with a README should be checked. This is for you to have a small description of the repo, when you open the repo page.


Adding Initial Layout

After creating your new repo, you will be provided with a screen as below. Here you need to click on Settings link, which is available as a last option in the main navigation.


In the settings, scroll down to find the widget with title, GitHub Pages. Click on the Automatic Page Generator button to get started with your initial design.


Note: In some cases, there will be a warning like below, saying that there’s already a page published at the specified URL. Just make sure that if there’s really a page exists or it throws out a 404 error as shown in the last section. If the case is 404, then go ahead and click on the Automatic Page Generator button to get started.


Once you have done with reading this, go ahead to #-Link-Snipped-#.