In the previous section, we created a web application using Jekyll, Backbone, and D3. With Jekyll, we created a template for the main page and included the minified JavaScript libraries and styles. With Jekyll, we can compile the markup files to generate a static website or serve the site without generating a static version using jekyll serve. In this section, we will publish our site using GitHub Pages, a hosting service for personal and project sites.

GitHub Pages is a service from GitHub that provides hosting for static websites created in Jekyll or HTML. To publish our Jekyll site, we need to create a branch named gh-pages and push the branch to GitHub. If this branch is a Jekyll project or contains an index.html file, GitHub will serve the content of this branch as a static site. We can create the branch from the master branch:

$ git checkout -b gh-pages

Next, push the branch to our origin, the GitHub endpoint:

$ git push -u origin gh-pages

This will push the gh-pages branch to GitHub, and GitHub Pages will generate the site in a few minutes. The application will be published and will be accessible through an URL of the form http://user.github.io/project-name, in our case, http://pnavarrc.github.io/hdi-explorer. It's important to remember that the base URL for the project will be http://user.github.io/project-name. Set the baseurl variable in the _config.yml file correctly to avoid path problems with the styles and JavaScript files.

The published version of the HDI Explorer application

We can create personal pages as well, but in this case, we would need to create a repository with a name of the form user.github.io, and the site will be a server from the http://user.github.io URL. GitHub Pages also allows you to use custom domains and plain HTML instead of Jekyll. More information about GitHub Pages can be found in the project site at http://pages.github.com/.