Set up custom domain name with GitHub pages

Intro

The whole process for various situations is described in GitHub documentation. This is just a reminder for myself how to properly configure top-level apex domain redirect with GitHub Pages.

All of your <username>.github.io or <orgname>.github.io pages will be redirected to the new custom domain, so your project pages can benefit from this automatically. If you already have a project page like <username>.github.io/projectname, this will become <custom.domain>/projectname.

Sequence of actions

Let’s say you own domain.com for the sake of example, and your github username is yourname.

On GitHub

Create a repository with name <username>.github.io or <orgname>.github.io depending on the repo type.

Create a repo yourname.github.io add a file called CNAME with the following contents to the root directory:

domain.com
www.domain.com

If you prefer the name with www prefix, put it at the top. Commit and push. That’s it with github.

At DNS provider config

Add an A record:

name: @
type: A
TTL : 1h
data: [185.199.108.153, 185.199.109.153, 185.199.110.153, 185.199.111.153]

Add a CNAME record:

name: www
type: CNAME
TTL : 1h
data: yourname.github.io

With domains.google.com this looks like the following:

It might take several hours for the information to propagate throughout the net and become accessible everywhere.