GitHub Help

Adding a new set of Pages for a project manually is a straightforward process if you're used to using command-line git.

Play it safe

Setting up Pages on a project requires a new "orphan" branch in your repository. The safest way to do this is to start with a fresh clone.

git clone https://github.com/user/repository.git
# Clone our repository
# Cloning into 'repository'...
# remote: Counting objects: 2791, done.
# remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1225/1225), done.
# remote: Total 2791 (delta 1722), reused 2513 (delta 1493)
# Receiving objects: 100% (2791/2791), 3.77 MiB | 969 KiB/s, done.
# Resolving deltas: 100% (1722/1722), done.

Let’s get crackin’

Now that we have a clean repository, we need to create the new branch and remove all content from the working directory and index.

cd repository

git checkout --orphan gh-pages
# Creates our branch, without any parents (it's an orphan!)
# Switched to a new branch 'gh-pages'

git rm -rf .
# Remove all files from the old working tree
# rm '.gitignore'

Now we have an empty working directory. We can create some content in this branch and push it to GitHub. For example:

echo "My GitHub Page" > index.html
git add index.html
git commit -a -m "First pages commit"
git push origin gh-pages