How to create and deploy your portfolio in under 10 minutes
Creating and hosting a portfolio is what every modern day programmer has to do. I did it a few days back and faced a few issues. At first, I didn’t know anything about the matter at hand. I did some research and was able to find a way that is super fast. I thought to myself so why not make this tedious process an easy one? Within the next 10 minutes we are going to deploy a static website (a portfolio) with a domain name of our choice and host it through github-pages. We are going to do all that for free! This guide will help beginner programmers to develop and deploy their portfolio’s easily. So let’s get started !!
The first thing you would need is an account on Github. Head out to Github and create one. Now you need to develop your portfolio website. You can easily download a portfolio template from the web and change it according to your demands. You can get one from here easily. Open the link and just click on fork and the project will be available on your github account. You would just need to make minor changes in the index.html file like adding your name, image etc which you can easily do if you have some basic html knowledge. Note that if you don’t want to download a template and want to create a portfolio on your own, it would take time. I created my portfolio all by myself using MaterializeCSS. Also, in my case just simply copying a template would have lead to plagiarism because this project is built during Udacity’s Front End Nanodegree. MaterializeCSS is amazing and is one of the most used CSS framework when it comes to responsive design.
After doing all this, you will have a portfolio ready but it’s not yet live. Do the following steps to publish your portfolio on web:
. Open your repository that you got after forking the project (if you wrote the code yourself then do create a repo on Github) and click on settings.
. Now navigate to Github Pages and select the branch where you have all your code. Choose master if you have not created any new branch and have just forked the repository from the link above.
. Now just visit this link: 'yourusername’.github.io/‘yourprojectname’ .
Voila! Your website is live.
You might be thinking the author talked about custom domain for free. Don’t worry, I don’t make fake promises! Here is how to do that!
We all can agree that this domain name doesn’t look good so we are going to get a cool domain name . Freenom is a great place to get domain names that end with .tk, a top level domain that is available for free. So just visit the link and get a domain name. Since we are hosting a portfolio so it is advised to get a domain that has your name in it. Like in my case, my name is not so common and I was able to get a domain that has my complete name in it. If your name is pretty common and you can’t get a domain name of your choice then you can curse your parents! They are responsible for that !!
Jokes apart, just get the domain name that is available :)
So now we have a domain name and we just need to link this domain name with our github repository. Perform the following tasks in order to do that:
. First of all visit your Repository. Click Settings.
. Now, Under GitHub Pages Section, enter your custom domain name(the one we bought from freenom.com) and click Save.
- Visit your Domain Provider. In this guide, we have chosen Freenom.com that provide free domain names.
- Now, Find Something Like, ‘DNS’,’DNS Management’,’DNS Configuration’,etc. where there is an option to add ‘A’ or ‘CNAME’ records.
Just ensure that the configuration looks like one below, by adding them.
So after doing all this, we can visit our portfolio website at the domain name that we bought. I purchased a domain myself and my portfolio is live here
If you would like to have a look at the source code then you can see it here
If you liked this story or it helped you in anyway then do clap 👏 for it so that other people will get to see it as well. Also, if you face any difficulty while performing any of this, feel free to comment below. I am happy to help!
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