How to Publish Your Online Portfolio

Archive note: This guide was originally published on July 6, 2023. GitHub Pages has changed since then, and this site now deploys Astro through GitHub Actions. Treat the screenshots and branch-deployment steps below as a record of the original workflow, and check the linked GitHub documentation for current instructions.

In the previous post, we talked about how to create an online portfolio. In this one, we’ll make it public.

What will you need?

You’ll need Git, a GitHub account, and a candy bar.

Configure the project

Create the GitHub repository

1. Create a GitHub repository.

   For free GitHub Pages hosting, the repository needed to be public when this guide was written.

2. Create a .gitignore file:

   touch .gitignore

3. Add the following content:

   # npm
   node_modules
   *.log
   *.gz
   
   # Coveralls
   .nyc_output
   coverage
   
   # Benchmarking
   benchmarks/graphs
   
   # Cypress
   cypress/screenshots/*
   cypress/videos/*

4. Initialize the local repository and connect it to GitHub:

   git init
   git add .
   git commit -m "Create portfolio project"
   git branch -M main
   git remote add origin git@github.com:username/project.git
   git push -u origin main

   Replace git@github.com:username/project.git with your repository’s URL.

Configure GitHub Pages

Open the repository on GitHub, then follow GitHub’s guide to configure a publishing source.

Once the deployment finishes, the site will be available at an address resembling:

https://your-user.github.io/project-repository/

Publish new changes

If you’re not familiar with Git, you’ll need to push to the main branch whenever you want your latest changes to go live.

You can learn more in GitHub’s introduction to using Git. The short version is:

git add .
git commit -m "Publish new changes"
git push origin main

Cover photograph by Roman Synkevych.