I use GitHub pages (aka gh-pages) very often now and find this feature extremely powerful for various reasons. This web site for instance, is first checked on Travis CI and then deployed to GitHub pages, which is way more convenient than using FileZilla.

Recently, I have been working on a small site for the QCBS that needed a site to introduce their R workshops. We (I was not the only one on board) decided to use the GitHub pages with Jekyll and one of the existing them, minima, that is we opt for using gh-pages the easiest way. As for every website I’m working on, I’ve looked for a way to check the visual rendering of the site before deploying it online. As for all the GitHub features, this is very well-documented on the GitHub website and I simply followed the guidelines! In a nutshell, once Ruby installed, and once the repository initiated with the proper files, the first step is to install the bundler:

1

$ gem install bundler

the second one is to install all the dependencies:

1

bundle install

including Jekyll:

1
2

$ jekyll --version
jekyll 3.8.5

and then the site can be deployed locally:

1

$ bundle exec jekyll serve

Sweet 😎! By the way, as I often use emojis 😅 I checked how to use them on our page, turns out there is a plugin for it, see https://help.github.com/en/articles/emoji-on-github-pages.