Using custom domain for GitHub pages

Recently I decided to host my personal portfolio site using GitHub pages. Even though they have very detailed instruction on how to setup a custom domain, I found it cumbersome to get to the right information. 🙄

Here are 2 key steps to setup your GitHub pages enabled project to use your custom domain.

⚙️Step 1 — Set domain in GitHub project

Go to your GitHub Pages site’s repository settings. Under “Custom domain”, add or remove your custom domain and click “Save”.

Setting “custom domain” creates a file named CNAME in the same repository. Don’t delete it.

⚙️Step 2 — Set custom resource record for domain

This step is specific to your domain name register (like GoDaddy, Domain.com, Google Domains, etc). All you need to do is set A & CNAME records for the selected domain.

This is a sample screenshot taken from the Google Domains portal.

For A record, set 185.199.108.153, 185.199.109.153, 185.199.110.153 and 185.199.111.153. To redirect www subdomain to the original domain, add a CNAME record with your GitHub pages profile URL with a .(dot) in the end, for example, ‘YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME.github.io.’.

Official References: For most up to date IP Addresses, use GitHub’s official documentation and for setting up CNAME use this documentation.

That’s it, both www.your-domain.com and your-domain.com will now go to your selected GitHub pages site (may need to wait up to 24 hours). If you want to see a live example, you may visit my portfolio “hossainkhan.com” hosted via GitHub pages repository ✌️.

UPDATE #1: The IP addresses for DNS A record is updated. The new IP addresses are required to use the free HTTPS support for GitHub pages.

UPDATE #2: Some people said this change is not working, it is actually because the DNS update can take upto 24 hours to propagate. So, I guess try hitting your domain next day 🤓

NOTE #1: Even though it’s very obvious, you should replace YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME and your-domain.com with your personal github username and domain name you are trying to use respectively.