← All tutorials
GitHub Pages deployment workflow for a static portfolio export
Beginner≈ 10 min·4 steps

Deploy your export to GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a good first host for a developer portfolio. It is free, reliable, and built for static files, which is exactly what a PortfolioDIY export contains.

You'll need a GitHub account and your exported ZIP. Git on the command line is optional — everything here works through the browser.

1

Create the repository

On GitHub, create a new public repository named exactly yourusername.github.io, substituting your real username. The name is the magic: GitHub treats a repo with this name as a website and serves its contents at that address.

Skip the README/gitignore options — you want an empty repository, since your export already has its own files.

2

Unzip your export

Extract the ZIP you downloaded from PortfolioDIY. Inside you'll find index.html at the top level, an assets/ folder with your CSS, JS, and images, plus robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and a README with these same instructions.

The structure matters: index.html must end up at the root of the repository, not inside a subfolder. If your unzip tool created a wrapping folder, upload the files inside it, not the folder itself.

3

Upload the files

In your empty repository, GitHub shows an "uploading an existing file" link. Click it, drag all the extracted files in — including the assets folder — and commit to the main branch.

If you prefer the command line: clone the repo, copy the files in, then git add, commit, and push. Either path ends in the same place.

4

Wait for the deploy, then verify

GitHub Pages builds automatically on every push to main. Within a minute or two, https://yourusername.github.io serves your portfolio with HTTPS included.

Open it and click through every link — nav anchors, project links, the contact button. What you're looking at is byte-for-byte the code you exported; there's no build step that could have changed anything.

Tip: Updating your site later is the same motion: edit in PortfolioDIY, re-export, replace the files in the repo, push.

Start Building Free

Reference-style reading instead? See the documentation.