Use Github Pages to publish your project documentation

Use Github Pages to publish your project documentation
GuideYou may be familiar with how to use Github Pages to share your work, or you may have read a tutorial that teaches you how to build your first Github Pages website. The recent improvements to Github Pages make it easier to publish your website from different data sources. One of the sources is the/docs directory of Your repository.

Document quality is a sign of the healthy development of a software project. For open-source projects, it is vital to maintain a reliable and error-free knowledge base and describe all the details in detail. The well-planned documents can help increase the intimacy of the project, provide step-by-step guidance, and promote cooperation in various ways to promote the collaboration process of open-source software development.

Hosting your documents on the Web is a time-consuming challenge, and there is no easy way to release and maintain it. However, this is not inevitable. Faced with a variety of different release tools, FTP servers, databases, files are stored in different locations in different ways, and these need to be adjusted manually. It should be noted that the traditional Web Publishing method provides unparalleled flexibility and performance, but in many cases, this is at the cost of simplicity and ease of use.

When used as a document, it is easier to maintain the document in less troublesome ways.

GitHub Pages allows you to create a website for your project in a specified way, which makes it a natural fit for publishing and maintaining documents. Because Github Pages supports Jekyll, you can use plain text or Markdown to write your documents, reducing your maintenance costs and reducing maintenance barriers. Jekyll also supports many useful tools, such as variables, templates, and Automatic Code highlighting. It gives you more flexibility without increasing complexity, you cannot see these on some heavy platforms.

The most important thing is that using Github Pages on GitHub means that your documents and code can use Issues and Pull Requests to ensure that it is properly maintained, and because GitHub Pages allows you to publish the/docs directory on the main branch of the code library, you can maintain your code library and its documents at the same time in the same branch.

Start now!

It takes only a few minutes to publish your first document page.

1. Create a/docs/index. md file in the main branch of Your repository.
2. Add your content in Jekyll format and submit your modifications.
   
3. View the setting branch of Your repository, select the main branch/docs directory, set it as the source of GitHub Pages, and click Save. You will get it done.

GitHub Pages will read content from your/docs directory and convert index. md to HTML. Then publish it to your GitHub Pages URL.

This will create and output a basic HTML, and you can use Jekyll's custom templates, CSS, and other features. If you want to view all the possibilities, you can look at GitHub Pages Showcase.