About GitHub Pages

You can use GitHub Pages to host a website about yourself, your organization, or your project directly from a repository on GitHub.

Who can use this feature?

GitHub Pages is available in public repositories with GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations, and in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see GitHub’s plans.

GitHub Pages now uses GitHub Actions to execute the Jekyll build. When using a branch as the source of your build, GitHub Actions must be enabled in your repository if you want to use the built-in Jekyll workflow. Alternatively, if GitHub Actions is unavailable or disabled, adding a .nojekyll file to the root of your source branch will bypass the Jekyll build process and deploy the content directly. For more information on enabling GitHub Actions, see Managing GitHub Actions settings for a repository.

In this article

About GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a static site hosting service that takes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files straight from a repository on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, optionally runs the files through a build process, and publishes a website. You can see examples of GitHub Pages sites in the GitHub Pages examples collection.

You can host your site on GitHub's github.io domain or your own custom domain. For more information, see Configuring a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site.

Unless your enterprise uses Enterprise Managed Users, you can choose to publish project sites publicly or privately by managing access control for the site. For more information, see "Changing the visibility of your GitHub Pages site."

To get started, see Creating a GitHub Pages site.

Organization owners can disable the publication of GitHub Pages sites from the organization's repositories. For more information, see Managing the publication of GitHub Pages sites for your organization.

Types of GitHub Pages sites

There are three types of GitHub Pages sites: project, user, and organization. Project sites are connected to a specific project hosted on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, such as a JavaScript library or a recipe collection. User and organization sites are connected to a specific account on GitHub.com.

To publish a user site, you must create a repository owned by your personal account that's named <username>.github.io. To publish an organization site, you must create a repository owned by an organization that's named <organization>.github.io. Unless you're using a custom domain, user and organization sites are available at http(s)://<username>.github.io or http(s)://<organization>.github.io.

The source files for a project site are stored in the same repository as their project. Unless you're using a custom domain, project sites are available at http(s)://<username>.github.io/<repository> or http(s)://<organization>.github.io/<repository>.

If you publish your site privately, the URL for your site will be different. For more information, see Changing the visibility of your GitHub Pages site.

For more information about how custom domains affect the URL for your site, see About custom domains and GitHub Pages.

You can only create one user or organization site for each account on GitHub Enterprise Cloud. Project sites, whether owned by an organization or a personal account, are unlimited.

Publishing sources for GitHub Pages sites

Warning

Unless your enterprise uses Enterprise Managed Users, GitHub Pages sites are publicly available on the internet by default, even if the repository for the site is private or internal. You can publish a site privately by managing access control for the site. Otherwise, if you have sensitive data in your site's repository, you may want to remove the data before publishing. For more information, see "About repositories" and "Changing the visibility of your GitHub Pages site."

You can publish your site when changes are pushed to a specific branch, or you can write a GitHub Actions workflow to publish your site.

If you do not need any control over the build process for your site, we recommend that you publish your site when changes are pushed to a specific branch. You can specify which branch and folder to use as your publishing source. The source branch can be any branch in your repository, and the source folder can either be the root of the repository (/) on the source branch or a /docs folder on the source branch. Whenever changes are pushed to the source branch, the changes in the source folder will be published to your GitHub Pages site.

If you want to use a build process other than Jekyll or you do not want a dedicated branch to hold your compiled static files, we recommend that you write a GitHub Actions workflow to publish your site. GitHub Enterprise Cloud provides workflow templates for common publishing scenarios to help you write your workflow.

For more information, see Configuring a publishing source for your GitHub Pages site.

Limitations for Enterprise Managed Users

If you're a managed user account, your use of GitHub Pages is limited.

  • GitHub Pages sites can only be published from repositories owned by organizations.
  • GitHub Pages sites are always privately published, and you cannot change this visibility. For more information, see Changing the visibility of your GitHub Pages site.
  • You cannot create an organization site (a site published from a repository named <organization>.github.io)

For more information about Enterprise Managed Users, see About Enterprise Managed Users.

Static site generators

GitHub Pages publishes any static files that you push to your repository. You can create your own static files or use a static site generator to build your site for you. You can also customize your own build process locally or on another server.

If you use a custom build process or a static site generator other than Jekyll, you can write a GitHub Actions to build and publish your site. GitHub Enterprise Cloud provides workflow templates for several static site generators. For more information, see Configuring a publishing source for your GitHub Pages site.

If you publish your site from a source branch, GitHub Pages will use Jekyll to build your site by default. If you want to use a static site generator other than Jekyll, we recommend that you write a GitHub Actions to build and publish your site instead. Otherwise, disable the Jekyll build process by creating an empty file called .nojekyll in the root of your publishing source, then follow your static site generator's instructions to build your site locally.

GitHub Pages does not support server-side languages such as PHP, Ruby, or Python.

Limits on use of GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages sites created after June 15, 2016, and using github.io domains are served over HTTPS. If you created your site before June 15, 2016, you can enable HTTPS support for traffic to your site. For more information, see Securing your GitHub Pages site with HTTPS.

Prohibited uses

GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS). GitHub Pages sites shouldn't be used for sensitive transactions like sending passwords or credit card numbers.

In addition, your use of GitHub Pages is subject to the GitHub Terms of Service, including the restrictions on get-rich-quick schemes, sexually obscene content, and violent or threatening content or activity.

Educational exercises

Using GitHub Pages to create a copy of an existing website as a learning exercise is not prohibited. However, in addition to complying with the GitHub Terms of Service, you must write the code yourself, the site must not collect any user data, and you must include a prominent disclaimer on the site indicating that the project is not associated with the original and was only created for educational purposes.

Usage limits

GitHub Pages sites are subject to the following usage limits:

  • GitHub Pages source repositories have a recommended limit of 1 GB. For more information, see About large files on GitHub

  • Published GitHub Pages sites may be no larger than 1 GB.

  • GitHub Pages deployments will timeout if they take longer than 10 minutes.

  • GitHub Pages sites have a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month.

  • GitHub Pages sites have a soft limit of 10 builds per hour. This limit does not apply if you build and publish your site with a custom GitHub Actions workflow.

  • In order to provide consistent quality of service for all GitHub Pages sites, rate limits may apply. These rate limits are not intended to interfere with legitimate uses of GitHub Pages. If your request triggers rate limiting, you will receive an appropriate response with an HTTP status code of 429, along with an informative HTML body.

If your site exceeds these usage quotas, we may not be able to serve your site, or you may receive a polite email from GitHub Support suggesting strategies for reducing your site's impact on our servers, including putting a third-party content distribution network (CDN) in front of your site, making use of other GitHub features such as releases, or moving to a different hosting service that might better fit your needs.

MIME types on GitHub Pages

A MIME type is a header that a server sends to a browser, providing information about the nature and format of the files the browser requested. GitHub Pages supports more than 750 MIME types across thousands of file extensions. The list of supported MIME types is generated from the mime-db project.

While you can't specify custom MIME types on a per-file or per-repository basis, you can add or modify MIME types for use on GitHub Pages. For more information, see the mime-db contributing guidelines.

Further reading