How To Set Up a Custom Subdomain For a GitHub Project

GitHub Pages are an excellent way to quickly create and serve up static web content – create a new repository, push an index.md, and enable Github Pages in the repository settings. The documentation on how to set up a custom subdomain for a particular project can sometimes be confusing.

To do so, you’ll need to do three things:

• Pick a custom subdomain – we’ll use til.tense.io for this example

• Add a CNAME file to the root of the project you’d like to serve up with GitHub Pages. Mine looked like this:

  til.tense.io
  

• Add a CNAME record with your DNS provider to direct requests to the subdomain to your user or organization’s GitHub subdomain, depending on whether the project is owned by a user or organization. In order to create til.tense.io, I added a record for tense.io that looked like this:

  name	type	TTL	Data
  til	CNAME	5 minutes	your-username-or-organization.github.com.

Once your DNS record has propagated, you should be able to navigate to your subdomain and see your new Jekyll-powered GitHub Pages website.