How to: GitHub Pages "gh-pages" branch for User & Organization Pages

README.md

GitHub Pages "Normal" Setup for User & Organization Pages

Let’s say your GitHub username is “alice”. If you create a GitHub repository named alice.github.com, commit a file named index.html into the master branch, and push it to GitHub, then this file will be automatically published to http://alice.github.com/... The same works for organizations.

Read more here: http://pages.github.com/

However... the downside of this is that anyone that forks this repo won't get it as a GitHub Pages repo when they are working on it... because they have a different GitHub "username" (or "organisation name").

So the trick is to not use a master branch as the documentation tells you... rather, use a gh-pages branch, as you would for your other "Project Pages".

Process

1. Create a New Repository on GitHub (don't follow any of the suggested setup instructions).
2. mkdir alice.github.com
3. cd alice.github.com
4. git init
5. git branch -m master gh-pages <- renames the "master" branch to "gh-pages"
6. echo "<h1>Hello Alice</h1>" > index.html
7. git add index.html
8. git commit -m "initial commit"
9. git remote add origin [email protected]:alice/alice.github.com.git
10. git push -u origin gh-pages

Bam. http://alice.github.com

---

I'm personally using this for my "viewsource" Organization Page... which is an open source GitHub Pages hosted CDN for popular (and less popular) JavaScript/CSS/HTML libraries and resources.

http://viewsource.github.com

Doesn't work.

If anyone has issues with this it is because you don't have an upstream branch yet.
To fix use:
git push --set-upstream origin gh-pages

I am having your current problem: page not found for http://alice.github.com

http://alice.github.io