You may have built a great website and would love to find out how it looks on your mobile device, but you don’t know how or where to publish your website.
In this article, I’ll show you how to set up and deploy your website for free on two platforms GITHUB AND NETLIFY.
GitHub and Netlify are both great places for deploying websites; Although there has been a contradiction on which one has better functionalities, Both have proven effective.
Before starting,you should have an account with the platform you’ve chosen to work with.
How to deploy your website on GitHub
GitHub is a platform where we can host websites and share codes for easy collaboration. GitHub lets you work on your code from anywhere at any time.
After creating your GitHub account, follow these steps to deploy your website on the platform.
1. Create a repository
Firstly you have to create an account. Go to github.com and then click on sign up.
Enter the requested information and click on continue…
Once you’ve verified your account, you have successfully created your account.
After creating your account, sign in using the GitHub desktop app or the website. Then create a new project by creating a repository. This repository is where all our files would be uploaded into.
1.1 Click on the create a new repository button on the website
1.2 Give your repository a name
Note that the name of your repository automatically becomes the name of your website, so you have to be sensitive in the kind of name to give your website
After naming your repository, leave all other options on the default setting and click on the create repository button.
1.3 After clicking on the button, you should have something like this
This is an empty github repository
2. Uploading the website files to your repository
On our empty repository, we have two options
to create a new file
upload an existing file
We’ll choose the upload existing files option because we have already created our files elsewhere
Once we choose that, a dialogue box appears which indicates that we should drag and drop our files to add them to the repository.
Let’s say you have a folder named new site, which contains files like your index.html, CSS, images, etc. you need to copy all the files inside the new site folder and then add them to the repository.
After dropping all your files, you have to click on commit changes. After a few seconds of processing, your repository should now look like this.
You can choose to add a readME to tell other developers who might come across your repository what it is all about
3. Using GitHub pages to host your website
From where you upload your files, you can click on the settings button and then click on pages located in the left corner of your GitHub account.
On the GitHub pages, leave the source in its default setting and set the branch to deploy from the main, and then save
If the website is indicating that GitHub pagesare currently disabled, change the /(root) option to /(docs) and then back to /(root) again. Remember to save as you make changes.
After that, If the website link does not show up, wait for a minute and refresh your page. Your link should have then displayed on the top of the GitHub pages like this.
You can now view your website online through that link.
Congrats! You now know how to:
Create a new GitHub repository
Upload files to the repository, and
Publish a website using GitHub
GitHub also allows you to share your work with others so they can comment on them and make changes or corrections.
Whenever you want to make changes to your website, you have to make the changes on your computer and then re-upload it to GitHub or make the changes directly from the repository.
Congratulation on publishing your first new website! Now we’ll learn how to publish a website with NetLify.
How to deploy your website on NetLify
Another method we can deploy websites is on NetLify.
Netlify is a friendly platform for deploying websites; it’s free and user-friendly.
To start deploying websites on NetLify, you must create an account. After doing that, Follow these step-by-step processes to publish your website.
1. Add your new Site
In your Netlify dashboard, you have three options
Import existing project (Import from GitHub):
If you have a GitHub repository and want to publish the site on Netlify, you can use this option.
Start from a template:
Netlify has ready-to-use templates for you to choose from for all types of projects.
Deploy manually by uploading the website folder.
1.1 Upload your website folder
Click on the browse to upload link on your dashboard and then upload your folder
2. Configure your website
After uploading your website, NetLify provides you with a random URL. You can edit this by clicking on the site settings
And then click on the change site name. Once you’ve been able to do that, you have successfully uploaded your website.
Conclusion
Creating a website is one thing but having platforms to share your work and show others what you have done gives you leverage mostly when you can not afford pricy hosting plans.
