You have yourself an Aurelia app (or you will soon), and you want to host it on GitHub Pages because GitHub provides a generous free hosting solution that gets powered from the Git repository itself.
Fortunately, the process couldn’t be more straightforward. A lot of this post will apply to other frameworks and libraries besides Aurelia 2. However, we will be focusing on Aurelia 2 only.
This article assumes the following:
- You already have a Git repository for your Aurelia project
- You are using GitHub to host your Git repository
Create a new branch
We need to create a new branch called gh-pages which GitHub will load our site from. If you use the command line, first run git branch gh-pages followed by git checkout gh-pages to switch to the gh-pages branch. If you’re using a GUI, follow the appropriate steps to create a new branch and switch to it.
Modify .gitignore
If you used the recommended way to initialise a new Aurelia 2 application, your .gitignore file by default will ignore the dist folder where your project files are built.
Inside of this file remove the entry ignoring dist and save it. Now commit and push your changes to the repository.
Build & Deploy
Building your Aurelia 2 application is a simple matter of running npm run build (or appropriate build command) which will then build the files into the dist directory.
Once the build has completed, all you need to do is push up the changes to the dist folder to the gh-pages branch and GitHub will serve them at the following URL https://github-username.github.io/my-repo — where github-username is your GitHub username and my-repo is the name of your repository on GitHub.
To push the contents of the dist folder run the following: git subtree push --prefix dist origin gh-pages and visit your site to see it in its deployed glory.