5 ms·

GitHub Launches Pages: Static Project and Personal Hosting

106 points by defunkt 18y ago

tsally 18y ago
Now they just need to let you map your own domain to it.
- defunkt 18y ago
  CNAME support is planned. We just wanted to get this thing out the door.
  - tsally 18y ago
    Awesome! I should have assumed. :-)
delano 18y ago
This is the best thing to happen to site hosting in a long, long time. It's possibly even the nail in the *forge coffin.
- thomasmallen 18y ago
  I thought that was Google Code.
  - delano 18y ago
    Google supplied the wood.
  - krschultz 18y ago
    Like a lot of good ideas from Google (Documents springs to mind as well) it seems like the initial version had a lot of promise and then it was followed up with few revisions to bring needed features.
- Harkins 18y ago
  Except they can never allow you to do anything dynamic on the server or you'd be able to read the HttpOnly github session cookies of anyone logged into github.com itself. Well, they could, but they'd have to move to www.github.com exclusively, wait for all those session cookies to expire or for folks to visit and get them reset...
  - snitko 18y ago
    You can read cookies from javascript, so it's not the issue. I think cookies' domain names are set strictly to 'github.com', not '*.github.com'.
    - Harkins 18y ago
      I checked. They're .github.com. Dunno why I was downvoted, I was right.
      - defunkt 18y ago
        See my other comment.
  - KirinDave 18y ago
    Actually, this isn't so true anymore. A friend of mine is a web developer and he's got a shocking dynamic site that the server treats as entirely static. He accomplishes this with JSON callbacks. http://iancollins.me http://iancollins.me (P.S. For a good time, click on the white background box or the "3N" logo when you're using are recent webkit nightly. Ian has a... ironic sense of humor.)
  - mojombo 18y ago
    GitHub cookies are restricted to github.com and gist.github.com domains (using a redirect trick to allow cross subdomain cookie sharing). You can use all the JavaScript you like on your Pages.
    - Harkins 18y ago
- biohacker42 18y ago
  If *forge, as you say, had at least decent and responsive service with CVS and SVN then perhaps it might be worth it for some people. But it doesn't! It needs to die.
- mmmurf 18y ago
  So true. I'm still waiting for aggregation of update messages so that I can follow way more stuff, but github is one of my favorite sites on the net already...
tlrobinson 18y ago
If would be neat if you could integrate the wiki into the site, with matching style (just a simple HTML layout for the wiki plus control of the CSS). If we could do that, I would consider moving a whole open source project's site to this.
- mct 18y ago
  It is a wiki, if you treat it like one. That's what's so cool about it. Two years ago, we moved the Philadelphia LUG website (http://phillylinux.org/ http://phillylinux.org/) from a set of static HTML pages to a subversion repository. I dropped in a post-commit hook to update the DocumentRoot after each checkin, and the site instantly became the best wiki I've ever used. Revision history is handled by diff, and svn blame. Updates are made with your favorite $EDITOR. And, as an added bonus, you get to use real HTML rather than some silly wiki markup language. I love it.
  - zacharydanger 18y ago
    You should checkout my post-commit script. It does essentially this, but for remote checkouts over SSH. http://htrm.designsauce.org http://htrm.designsauce.org
  - boucher 18y ago
    One of the most important parts of being a wiki is having a low barrier to entry. Revision control systems (git even more so than svn or cvs) is a huge barrier to entry.
    - gnaritas 18y ago
      As is real HTML. Wikis have simplified markup for a reason.
babyshake 18y ago
I really like this, but I think a lot of the examples so far aren't really taking advantage of what makes this different. What makes Github different is that it's connected to your version control, so I don't see this being especially useful for things like personal websites, but it could be a great way to supplement the admin and analytics offered by Github already.
- Locke 18y ago
  Yeah, this might make a nice tool for publishing any api docs (checkout a separate branch, generate, commit, and push your api docs), or code coverage reports, etc. I don't know if it's really taken off, but a bug tracking tool like ditz could really benefit from this (it can generate an html report based on the bug "database" stored in your git repo). http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ http://ditz.rubyforge.org/
Raphael 18y ago
GitHub is taking over the world. I wouldn't be surprised if non-programmers start finding uses for it.
- tdavis 18y ago
  I would be incredibly surprised if such a thing happened. Not because GitHub isn't awesome (it is), but because most non-programmers would look at you funny if you said "distributed version control". I mean, most people can barely use the Internet competently.
raju 18y ago
This looks really cool. Looking forward to trying it out...
mhartl 18y ago
I wish the GitHub guys would stop working so hard; they're making everyone else look bad by comparison. ;-)
wastedbrains 18y ago
OK everyone share your personal pages / github user names... http://danmayer.github.com http://danmayer.github.com (lame site but just put it up for the hell of it)
gojomo 18y ago
Great idea and implementation. There may be some risk with allowing arbitrary-content (including Javascript) on subdomains of github.com. I tried a few trivial cookie/script/iframe tricks, and was not able to reach logged-in user info. However, my skills are far from the state-of-evil-art. Note that even Google put their page-hosting on a separate 2nd-level-domain, googlepages.com, rather than a subdomain of google.com.
- defunkt 18y ago
  Please see my other comment. You cannot get user login information from Pages.
  - gojomo 18y ago
    In some browsers, there's currently a way: Safari and IE (but not FF or Chrome) will display 'text/plain'-served-content as HTML. That means the GitHub 'raw' view of project content can be used to execute arbitrary user JS from github.com. Such JS can get at a logged-in user's name and make (at the very least) superficial changes to profile information. A harmless demo (works on Safari and IE) is here: http://github.com/gojomo/scratch/raw/master/getuser/index.html http://github.com/gojomo/scratch/raw/master/getuser/index.ht... Trivially, then, a Pages subdomain can use the above in an iframe to export the username out. Demo: http://gojomo.github.com/getuser http://gojomo.github.com/getuser The 'raw' issue seems more serious and isn't affected by whether Pages are on .github.com subdomains or not. Still, subdomains have a slight leg up on exploiting any security slip-ups and browser bugs that may occur.
    - defunkt 18y ago
      Not a problem in Safari 3. URL 1 in Safari: http://img.skitch.com/20081222-kr2k6gwm1b8cbt3i7xqy6n5x9c.png http://img.skitch.com/20081222-kr2k6gwm1b8cbt3i7xqy6n5x9c.pn... URL 2 in Safari: http://img.skitch.com/20081222-dk57nxe9epdxx9u5gt71gu1u4p.png http://img.skitch.com/20081222-dk57nxe9epdxx9u5gt71gu1u4p.pn... Please report security bugs at http://support.github.com http://support.github.com - not in old Hacker News comments which may never been seen. Thanks.
lallysingh 18y ago
Anyone else click on the link for you.github.com, expecting a demo page?

106 points by defunkt 18y ago

tsally 18y ago

Now they just need to let you map your own domain to it.

defunkt 18y ago
CNAME support is planned. We just wanted to get this thing out the door.
- tsally 18y ago
  Awesome! I should have assumed. :-)

delano 18y ago

This is the best thing to happen to site hosting in a long, long time. It's possibly even the nail in the *forge coffin.

thomasmallen 18y ago
I thought that was Google Code.
- delano 18y ago
  Google supplied the wood.
- krschultz 18y ago
  Like a lot of good ideas from Google (Documents springs to mind as well) it seems like the initial version had a lot of promise and then it was followed up with few revisions to bring needed features.
Harkins 18y ago
Except they can never allow you to do anything dynamic on the server or you'd be able to read the HttpOnly github session cookies of anyone logged into github.com itself. Well, they could, but they'd have to move to www.github.com exclusively, wait for all those session cookies to expire or for folks to visit and get them reset...
- snitko 18y ago
  You can read cookies from javascript, so it's not the issue. I think cookies' domain names are set strictly to 'github.com', not '*.github.com'.
  - Harkins 18y ago
    I checked. They're .github.com. Dunno why I was downvoted, I was right.
    - defunkt 18y ago
      See my other comment.
- KirinDave 18y ago
  Actually, this isn't so true anymore. A friend of mine is a web developer and he's got a shocking dynamic site that the server treats as entirely static. He accomplishes this with JSON callbacks. http://iancollins.me http://iancollins.me (P.S. For a good time, click on the white background box or the "3N" logo when you're using are recent webkit nightly. Ian has a... ironic sense of humor.)
- mojombo 18y ago
  GitHub cookies are restricted to github.com and gist.github.com domains (using a redirect trick to allow cross subdomain cookie sharing). You can use all the JavaScript you like on your Pages.
  - Harkins 18y ago
biohacker42 18y ago
If *forge, as you say, had at least decent and responsive service with CVS and SVN then perhaps it might be worth it for some people. But it doesn't! It needs to die.
mmmurf 18y ago
So true. I'm still waiting for aggregation of update messages so that I can follow way more stuff, but github is one of my favorite sites on the net already...

tlrobinson 18y ago

If would be neat if you could integrate the wiki into the site, with matching style (just a simple HTML layout for the wiki plus control of the CSS). If we could do that, I would consider moving a whole open source project's site to this.

mct 18y ago
It is a wiki, if you treat it like one. That's what's so cool about it. Two years ago, we moved the Philadelphia LUG website (http://phillylinux.org/ http://phillylinux.org/) from a set of static HTML pages to a subversion repository. I dropped in a post-commit hook to update the DocumentRoot after each checkin, and the site instantly became the best wiki I've ever used. Revision history is handled by diff, and svn blame. Updates are made with your favorite $EDITOR. And, as an added bonus, you get to use real HTML rather than some silly wiki markup language. I love it.
- zacharydanger 18y ago
  You should checkout my post-commit script. It does essentially this, but for remote checkouts over SSH. http://htrm.designsauce.org http://htrm.designsauce.org
- boucher 18y ago
  One of the most important parts of being a wiki is having a low barrier to entry. Revision control systems (git even more so than svn or cvs) is a huge barrier to entry.
  - gnaritas 18y ago
    As is real HTML. Wikis have simplified markup for a reason.

babyshake 18y ago

I really like this, but I think a lot of the examples so far aren't really taking advantage of what makes this different. What makes Github different is that it's connected to your version control, so I don't see this being especially useful for things like personal websites, but it could be a great way to supplement the admin and analytics offered by Github already.

Locke 18y ago
Yeah, this might make a nice tool for publishing any api docs (checkout a separate branch, generate, commit, and push your api docs), or code coverage reports, etc. I don't know if it's really taken off, but a bug tracking tool like ditz could really benefit from this (it can generate an html report based on the bug "database" stored in your git repo). http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ http://ditz.rubyforge.org/

Raphael 18y ago

GitHub is taking over the world. I wouldn't be surprised if non-programmers start finding uses for it.

tdavis 18y ago
I would be incredibly surprised if such a thing happened. Not because GitHub isn't awesome (it is), but because most non-programmers would look at you funny if you said "distributed version control". I mean, most people can barely use the Internet competently.

raju 18y ago

This looks really cool. Looking forward to trying it out...

mhartl 18y ago

I wish the GitHub guys would stop working so hard; they're making everyone else look bad by comparison. ;-)

wastedbrains 18y ago

OK everyone share your personal pages / github user names... http://danmayer.github.com http://danmayer.github.com (lame site but just put it up for the hell of it)

gojomo 18y ago

Great idea and implementation. There may be some risk with allowing arbitrary-content (including Javascript) on subdomains of github.com. I tried a few trivial cookie/script/iframe tricks, and was not able to reach logged-in user info. However, my skills are far from the state-of-evil-art. Note that even Google put their page-hosting on a separate 2nd-level-domain, googlepages.com, rather than a subdomain of google.com.

defunkt 18y ago
Please see my other comment. You cannot get user login information from Pages.
- gojomo 18y ago
  In some browsers, there's currently a way: Safari and IE (but not FF or Chrome) will display 'text/plain'-served-content as HTML. That means the GitHub 'raw' view of project content can be used to execute arbitrary user JS from github.com. Such JS can get at a logged-in user's name and make (at the very least) superficial changes to profile information. A harmless demo (works on Safari and IE) is here: http://github.com/gojomo/scratch/raw/master/getuser/index.html http://github.com/gojomo/scratch/raw/master/getuser/index.ht... Trivially, then, a Pages subdomain can use the above in an iframe to export the username out. Demo: http://gojomo.github.com/getuser http://gojomo.github.com/getuser The 'raw' issue seems more serious and isn't affected by whether Pages are on .github.com subdomains or not. Still, subdomains have a slight leg up on exploiting any security slip-ups and browser bugs that may occur.
  - defunkt 18y ago
    Not a problem in Safari 3. URL 1 in Safari: http://img.skitch.com/20081222-kr2k6gwm1b8cbt3i7xqy6n5x9c.png http://img.skitch.com/20081222-kr2k6gwm1b8cbt3i7xqy6n5x9c.pn... URL 2 in Safari: http://img.skitch.com/20081222-dk57nxe9epdxx9u5gt71gu1u4p.png http://img.skitch.com/20081222-dk57nxe9epdxx9u5gt71gu1u4p.pn... Please report security bugs at http://support.github.com http://support.github.com - not in old Hacker News comments which may never been seen. Thanks.

lallysingh 18y ago

Anyone else click on the link for you.github.com, expecting a demo page?