Github Pages and Documentation

GitHub Pages gives you a direct path to create websites for your projects, which makes it a natural choice for publishing and maintaining documentation. Because GitHub Pages supports Jekyll, you can pen your documentation in plain text or Markdown to help maintain a lower barrier to contribution. Jekyll also includes support for many helpful tools like variables, templates, and automatic code highlighting, which gives you much of the flexibility you’d find in a bulkier platform without the added complexity.

Publishing your first documentation page only takes a few minutes.

Create a /docs/index.md file on your repository's master branch.


Add your content and any necessary Jekyll front matter, then commit your changes.

Visit your repository’s settings tab and select master branch /docs folder as the GitHub Pages source. Click save, and you’re done.

GitHub Pages will read the contents of your /docs directory, convert the index.md into HTML, and publish the results at your GitHub Pages URL.

This will generate the most basic HTML output that you can further customize with templates, CSS, and other features available in Jekyll. To see examples of what all is possible, take a look at the GitHub Pages Showcase.