Astro on GitHub Pages: a static-only stage

GitHub Pages is a very basic hosting service: no server-side rendering, no databases, no backend features.
But that simplicity makes it perfect for what I needed: a place to put a personal site and some small demos.

Why GitHub Pages?

Two main reasons:

It’s free and comes with a github.io subdomain.
It only requires static files, which matched perfectly with Astro.

Instead of paying for hosting just to serve plain HTML, GitHub Pages was a natural choice.

The deployment process

The process was simple: configure Astro with the static adapter, build the project, and push the result to a branch that GitHub Pages can serve.
I automated it with a GitHub Action so I don’t need to think about uploads or manual steps.

Within minutes, the site was live under my username.github.io domain.

More than Astro

Since I already had the free domain, I decided to use the same repository to showcase other experiments.
Alongside this blog made with Astro, I added small demos with React, Svelte, and Vue.
It turned my GitHub Pages site into a lightweight portfolio of experiments.

Takeaways

GitHub Pages is limited, but that’s fine for static sites.
Astro works well in this environment because it generates everything as static HTML.
A free github.io domain is a great way to share quick demos without extra setup.

For me, GitHub Pages became less about hosting a single site and more about having a small public stage for different projects.