It’s easy to serve a website using GitHub Pages by creating the gh-pages branch in a GitHub repo. The instructions can be found here.

In my case, I have an existing repository that has some stuff. I want to use GitHub Pages to serve some .md files, but I don’t want to include the stuff from my master branch. What I had to do was:

1. Create/checkout an orphan gh-pages branch.
   • An orphan branch is not connected to the other branches and commits, and its working tree has no files at all. See here for more info.
2. Commit .md files to the branch.

To create the orphan gh-pages branch (based on instructions from Hugo):

git checkout --orphan gh-pages
git reset --hard
git commit --allow-empty -m "Initializing gh-pages branch"
git push origin gh-pages
git checkout master

Once the branch is pushed to GitHub, you have to go to the Settings page of the repository. In the section “GitHub Pages”, select gh-pages as the source. The step is described in more details here. If successful, you will see a message saying “Your site is published at https://your-username.github.io/your-repository/”.

Now you can add files to the gh-pages branch, and they will show up on your new website:

git checkout gh-pages
# Adding files ...
git commit -m "Add files"
git push origin gh-pages
git checkout master