Adding a Custom Domain to a Github Pages Project Site

In the previous post I pushed generated static site content to Github Pages, to be served as https://jfasch.github.io/jfasch-home-pages/.

Not being a marketing expert (the opposite is the case), I do suspect that promoting that URL as my homepage would appear unprofessional. Rather,

• I own a domain, faschingbauer.me

• To make things easy for people who have the intention of throwing money at me, I want to have the following URLs point to the above Github Pages site:

  • http://www.faschingbauer.me

  • https://www.faschingbauer.me

  • http://faschingbauer.me

  • https://faschingbauer.me

This is remarkably simple nowadays. The Github Pages documentation is a little confusing: they only talk about user and organization pages, and not about project pages. There are numerous posts on the internet that suggest that adding a custom domain to a project page has been cumbersome in the past - these days are over, apparently. Following is what I did.

Contents

Configure a Subdomain, www.faschingbauer.me

1. For the jfasch-home-pages project, configure a custom domain

   (Enforcing HTTPS also makes sense, while we are at it)

   

   All this does is to create a docs/CNAME; pull the changes,

   $ cd $HOME/jfasch-home-pages
   $ git pull
   

2. Point www.faschingbauer.me to jfasch.github.io

   At your DNS provider, create a CNAME DNS record for www.faschingbauer.me and set its value to point to jfasch.github.io. Wait a day before you publish the new site URL - it may take some time until the changes have propagated to other name servers. Check like so,

   $ dig www.faschingbauer.me
   
   ;www.faschingbauer.me.            IN      A
   
   ;; ANSWER SECTION:
   www.faschingbauer.me.     1100    IN      CNAME   jfasch.github.io.
   jfasch.github.io. 3600    IN      A       185.199.109.153
   jfasch.github.io. 3600    IN      A       185.199.111.153
   jfasch.github.io. 3600    IN      A       185.199.110.153
   jfasch.github.io. 3600    IN      A       185.199.108.153
   

   (Output stripped for brevity.) In the ANSWER SECTION you can see that www.faschingbauer.me. (the trailing dot says this is a FQDN “Fully Qualified Domain Name”) is an alias (CNAME) for jfasch.github.io.. And btw., jfasch.github.io. has four addresses (A).

3. Done; surf to https://www.faschingbauer.me.

Configure an Apex Domain, faschingbauer.me

We have the subdomain www.faschingbauer.me in place, pointing to our site; now we want faschingbauer.me to go to the same site. Github automatically, magically, apparently, redirects between apex and subdomains. Consequentially, it is just a matter of DNS configuration: at the DNS provider, arrange that faschingbauer.me points to one or more of Github’s static IP addresses (taken from the output of the above dig command). These are,

185.199.108.153
185.199.109.153
185.199.110.153
185.199.111.153

Go to the DNS provider, and arrange that the DNS address (A) record for faschingbauer.me points to one or all of these addresses.

Deploying Sphinx Generated Documentation to Github Pages   Using Microsoft Teams on Linux