Publishing using Github

Show us your art!

The next thing we want to do is show the world what we’ve made! There are different ways to go about this. One of the easiest ones is provided by Github.

You should all have signed up for a Github account. If you haven’t, now is the time!

As you might remember, Github uses git, which is a version control software that is used to track changes in text documents. This alone makes it perfect for hosting our code and enables us to travel back in time and undo errors that we might introduce.

Using git you can create so-called repositories in your folders. The folder and its subfolders are then tracked and git tells you immediately if and what has changed in the files that are contained within the repository. You can ‘commit’ to a change you made and synchronize your local repository with the one that is hosted on Github.

But what’s even better is that Github gives us the possibility to turn every repository into a website.

First, let’s create our new repository on Github:

• Sign in to Github (https://github.com)
• Create a new repository and call it myartwork

Don’t worry about the other options for now. Using git in the command line, the Github app (available on Windows and Mac OS X), or Sourcetree (https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/), clone this repository to get a local copy. Copy the file that contains your artwork into your local repository and call it index.html. The reason for this is that ‘index.html’ is the default file that is loaded on the server.

Save the file, commit the change, and push the changes to the repository on Github.

Right now, our code is on the web, but we haven’t told the Github to publish it yet. To do this, go to the Github repository settings (under Watch/Star counters), and change the default GitHub Pages branch to master.