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HTTPS on Github Pages with a Custom Domain

September 03, 2017

Update: Custom domains on GitHub Pages gain support for HTTPS

Since all browsers are trying to force HTTPS; it is highly recommended to setup it up on your domain name; however for websites with custom domains hosted on Github pages it wasn’t supported because the certificates provided by Github is specific for *.github.io domains.

Thanks to CloudFlare, this became possible using the following steps:

  1. Go to cloudflare.com and create a free account
  2. Make sure that your gh-pages branch contains a CNAME file and the domain is added correctly
  3. Add your website to CloudFlare, you will be provided with new nameservers to use and they will contain all the old A records, which will make the transition from Github to Cloudflare easy with no downtime at all
  4. Open CloudFlare settings for your domain and Change the SSL to ‘Full’

  1. Open page rules for your domain and add a new page rule

Please note that these changes may take up to 24 hours to propagate correctly. Until Github provides a native solution, this is the quickest way to accomplish this.