A lot of tutorials on setting up Jekyll for GitHub Pages recommend pushing to a orphaned gh-pages branch. That’s OK if you want to create a page for a specific project under <username>.github.io/<project> but not if you want to setup a personal <username>.github.io page.

What happened

I set up a repo with the same name as my username after reading the error page when visiting <username>.github.io and after setting up Jekyll and pushing to gh-pages branch, the URL wasn’t what I wanted.

How I fixed it

You need to make sure the repository name follows the convention <username>.github.io. Also note that you must push to master and not gh-pages for this type of repo.

How I found the solution

• My first attempt at pushing a personal blog on GitHub didn’t give me the correct URL path. I ended up with <username>.github.io/<username>
  • After googling around, I found out what I need is called a User Page. This GitHub Help Page showed me the way:

    If your site is a User or Organization Page that has a repository named .github.io or .github.io , you cannot publish your site's source files from different locations. User and Organization Pages that have this type of repository name are only published from the master branch.