Changing the visibility of your GitHub Pages site

About access control for GitHub Pages sites

If your project site is published from a private or internal repository that's owned by an organization using GitHub Enterprise Cloud, you can manage access control for the site. With access control, you can choose to publish the site publicly to anyone on the internet or privately to people with read access to your repository. A privately published site can be used to share your internal documentation or knowledge base with members of your enterprise. You cannot manage access control for an organization site. For more information about the types of GitHub Pages sites, see "About GitHub Pages."

Privately published sites are available at a different subdomain than publicly published sites. This ensures that your GitHub Pages site is secure from the moment it's published:

• We automatically secure every subdomain of *.pages.github.io with a TLS certificate, and enforce HSTS to ensure that browsers always serve the page over HTTPS.
• We use a unique subdomain for the private page to ensure that other repositories in your organization cannot publish content on the same origin as the private page. This protects your private page from "cookie tossing". This is also why we don't host GitHub Pages sites on the github.com domain.

You can see your site's unique subdomain in the pages tab of your repository settings. If you're using a static site generator configured to build the site with the repository name as a path, you may need to update the settings for the static site generator when changing the site to private. For more information, see "Configuring Jekyll in your GitHub Pages site" or the documentation for your static site generator.

To use a shorter and more memorable domain for your private GitHub Pages site, you can configure a custom domain. For more information, see "Configuring a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site."

Changing the visibility of your GitHub Pages site

1. On GitHub, navigate to your site's repository.

2. Under your repository name, click Settings.

3. In the left sidebar, click Pages.

4. Under "GitHub Pages", select the GitHub Pages visibility drop-down menu, then click a visibility.

5. To see your published site, under "GitHub Pages", click your site's URL.

   Note: It can take up to 20 minutes for changes to your site to publish after you push the changes to GitHub. If your don't see your changes reflected in your browser after an hour, see "About Jekyll build errors for GitHub Pages sites."