HTTPS And Your Custom Domain on Github Pages

Please note that all opinions are that of the author.

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine!

Github for sometime now has supported https for *.github.io (aka GitHub pages). And they have allowed it for custom domains as well. However I was never able to figure this out until yesterday. Here was the magic process and well as some references.

My issue was that I had three “sites” hosted on GitHub pages:

http://www.fuzzyblog.io/ - my personal home page and resume
http://www.fuzzyblog.io/blog/ - my blog
http://www.fuzzyblog.io/recipes/

I tend to look at my online presence mostly as my blog / recipes. I had actually forgotten that the root personal home page site even existed. And the issues preventing me from having https working amounted to this:

Changing the A records on my DNS provider (Amazon’s Route 53)
Waiting 24 hours for a certificate to be generated
Clicking the Enforce Https option on the GitHub Settings for the repo that drives fuzzyblog.io. This has to be done first
Clicking the Enforce Https option on the GitHub Settings for all other GitHub Pages repos (for me this was blog and recipes)

Note: If you can’t remember which git repo drives your GitHub Pages, look in the directory and file .git/config. It will be right there; look for a url / .git filename.

Note: In case you were wondering why you want https, there are lots of reasons but the best is that it should give your content at least a small boost in page rank.

HTTPS And Your Custom Domain on Github Pages

Recommended Reading