Foundations of Web Development Series, Part III: Deploying Your Website

This guide was developed for web developers at Levare, a volunteer initiative meant to amplify the Black community by helping Black-owned businesses create an online presence.

Ready for Production

After you have made all your commits and merged all your PRs, it’s time to merge everything to your master or your production branch. This is the branch where all your source code for your website will be and where you will deploy it. If you are not confident about deploying from your production branch yet or would like to see how your website looks as you develop it, you can also set up deployment on your staging branch so that you can see what you’re presenting to your client before giving them the final product.

Deployment

When you run your code on your computer, only you are able to see the website on your local computer. If you want the rest of the Internet to have access to your website, you will need to host and deploy your website. For front-end and back-end, there are different deployment methods, depending on what frameworks you used for your code.

Front-end

You can host your website on Github for free, but deployment is usually pricey. Luckily, there are a few free and easy-to-use deployment methods.

Github Pages

Github Pages allows every user on Github one personal static website and a page for every repository you have. Changes made to your repository will be automatically reflected on your website. This is great if you do not want to use any tools outside of Github.

To set up, the main thing you need to know is that when you create your remote repository, the name of your project must be [yourusername].github.io, where [yourusername] is your Github account’s username. You will be able to access your website using the same URL.

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Repository Name in Settings

If you want to configure your settings so that you can deploy from another branch, change the domain, pick a theme for your website, or enforce HTTPS, you can scroll to the bottom and change the publishing settings.