Marko Apfel
Blogging

Forwarding a Custom Domain to GitHub Pages

Why the blog moved from Geeks With Blogs to a Markdown and Git based workflow on GitHub Pages, and how to forward a custom GoDaddy domain to it via A records and a CNAME entry.

2 min read

This blog post explains the intention of using GitHub Pages to host my own blog content. It also describes how to configure a new GoDaddy domain to have a nice entry point into this blog.

Motivation

Over several years I’ve blogged via Geeks With Blogs. But the more I maintained an internal wiki for my development team, the more it felt wrong to write content with a WYSIWYG editor. I came to love Markdown and Git-based repositories.

Additionally the question came up: “Why write for another provider instead of myself?”

Therefore it was clear that it was necessary to move my blog away and switch to a toolchain with Markdown and Git.

GitHub Pages

Overview

Initially the blog should have been hosted on one of my existing domains with vServer infrastructure in the background.

But that step was too big because of the additional familiarization with Git on the hosting side that would be necessary.

That will be investigated somewhere in the future.

So for the first phase it is good enough to use GitHub Pages to host my static content.

Prepare the blog

To use GitHub Pages as a provider for your own blog content, it is necessary to create a Git repository for it. Yes, only a Git repository holding the blog content as static web pages is necessary to serve the content.

  1. Create a new repository and name it <your-user-name>.github.io. That’s all. Now you have a base to start.

  2. Check the state of your GitHub page in a browser with http://<your-user-name>.github.com.

  3. Go to the settings of that repository.

    Repository Settings

  4. Define your custom domain.

    Set Custom Domain

GoDaddy

In the meantime a new domain apfel.space is used as an entry point to my hosted content. A .space domain is very cheap - only $15 for two years. So it’s a good deal: pay some bucks and avoid side effects for existing stuff.

Configure new domain

After ordering the new domain you have to configure a forwarding to your GitHub page from your new domain.

Unfortunately I was not able to switch the UI language to English. So the screenshots have German texts. (a ticket was created with GoDaddy).

  1. Select the domain to configure.

    Use my domain

  2. Connect it with an already existing web site (your GitHub Page).

    Connect

  3. Configure two A record entries to point to the IP addresses of GitHub Pages (192.30.252.153 and 192.30.252.154) and the CNAME for blog to point to the address of your GitHub page (http://<your-user-name>.github.com).

    Configure entries

  4. Wait a while (up to 1h) to get the updates populated.