Notes for next time I set up a custom domain on GitHub Pages. It’s actually been years since I set up my personal web-site. I’ve owned this domain for years but have never deployed anything on it… lol. So here’s what I discovered and learned. Mainly for my own reference as I’m sure I’ll need to do this again but its for anyone who wants to set up their own website and assign a domain.

DNS records

Apex domain (Fancy word for root domain, nothing in front of it like www. or any subdomain) - four A records:

Set this on Squarespace to point to Github’s Pages servers (Because I am deploying on gh pages)

185.199.108.153
185.199.109.153
185.199.110.153
185.199.111.153

www subdomain - one CNAME record pointing to mattbho.github.io.

After saving DNS

  1. Set the custom domain in repo Settings > Pages
  2. Wait 10-30 minutes - GitHub provisions a Let’s Encrypt cert automatically, but it needs DNS to propagate first (took a whole day for me don’t be surprised lol)
  3. Once Enforce HTTPS is clickable, enable it