10 October, 2023
I have a domain named milon.im, though I have some other domains, but I use it as my main domain for personal use. I have my personal website hosted in Github Pages. You can have a repository with github and name it like <username>.github.io and the pages enabled from this repository can be found in the same domain. I have a repository named milon.github.io and I have hosted my personal website here using a static site generator named Jigsaw. You can also assign a custom domain in this repository. I have assigned milon.im as my custom domain. So, my personal website can be found in milon.im. For doing that you can go to the repository settings and assign a custom domain. You can also add a CNAME file in the root of your repository and add your custom domain there. I have added a CNAME file in the root of my repository and added milon.im there. You can also do it from the repository settings. Then you have to go to the nameserver settings of your domain and add a A record with the IP address of Github Pages. You can find the IP address from here. I have added an A record with the IP address of Github Pages in my domain's nameserver settings. Now, I can access my personal website in milon.im.
I have some other hobby projects, which is also hosted in Github Pages. If you have an apex domain configured, then all other github pages site can be hosted like this- <username>.github.io/<repository>. During I COVID lockdown, I have spent some time on cooking various dish, and created a website with the recipes of those dishes. I was hosting that site on netlify. Netlify is great, if you are using a static site generator with Javascript. I was using a PHP based static site generator, so I had to face couple of issue. First of all, the default PHP version of netlify is PHP 7.4, and you can't use any version other than 7.4 or 8.0. So I decided to switch that site to github pages. After switching, the site was accessable milon.im/recipes URL.
Then I thought, why not use a subdomain like recipes.milon.im to host this site. Luckly it is very easy to do with github pages. You basically need 3 things to have it-
recipes.milon.im in the CNAME file.recipes.milon.im in the CNAME record in my DNS settings and the target was milon.im domain. I am using cloudflare as the DNS provider, which actually comes with bunch of other features. The most useful for me is the SSL certificate. I don't have to worry about SSL certificate for my subdomain. Cloudflare provides it for free.I the added a github actions to automate the build and deploy process. I have added a build-publish.yml file in .github/workflows folder. You can learn more about how to do that in this post. Now, I can access my recipes site in recipes.milon.im.