Turn your interactive assignment into a live website using GitHub Pages–free hosting, version tracking, and a shareable URL.
You’ve built an interactive assignment. It works in your browser. Now you need to put it somewhere students and colleagues can access it. That’s what GitHub Pages does–it turns your repository into a live website, for free.
A repository (or “repo”) is a folder that GitHub tracks–it holds your files and remembers every change. A commit is a saved snapshot with a note about what changed. GitHub Pages takes the files in your repository and serves them as a website. You upload an HTML file, GitHub gives you a URL.
Log into GitHub and click the green “New” button. Name it something descriptive–“revenue-forecasting-exercise” beats “assignment1.” Six months from now you’ll have multiple repos and want to tell them apart.
Set the repository to Public. GitHub Pages is free on public repos, and the whole philosophy here is openness. Check the box to add a README file. Click “Create repository.”
Click “Add file” -> “Upload files.” Drag your HTML file (and any CSS, images, or data files) into the upload area. Write a commit message (“Initial upload of revenue forecasting exercise”) and click “Commit changes.”
Your files are now on GitHub, version-tracked, and visible to anyone with the link.
Go to Settings -> Pages (in the left sidebar). Under “Source,” select Deploy from a branch. Choose main and / (root). Click Save.
After a minute or two, you’ll see a URL like https://yourusername.github.io/revenue-forecasting-exercise/. Your interactive assignment is now live. Share that URL in your LMS, your syllabus, anywhere. No login required, no software to install.
Find a bug or want to add a section? Edit files directly on GitHub (click the file, then the pencil icon) or upload a new version. Every change gets a commit message and GitHub keeps the entire history. You can always roll back if something breaks.
The README is the first thing visitors see. Include what the assignment covers, what course it’s designed for, any key assumptions, and a link to the live GitHub Pages site. A good README is the difference between a repository that gets used and one that gets ignored.
You now have an interactive assignment hosted on the web for free. But the real power of GitHub isn’t just hosting–it’s collaboration. In the final post, I’ll walk through forks, branches, and pull requests: the mechanics that let us build on each other’s teaching materials instead of reinventing the wheel every semester.
For attribution, please cite this work as
Overton (2026, Feb. 19). Michael Overton, PhD: Hosting Your Assignments on GitHub. Retrieved from https://www.michaeloverton.net/posts/2026-02-19-hosting-assignments-on-github/
BibTeX citation
@misc{overton2026hosting,
author = {Overton, Michael},
title = {Michael Overton, PhD: Hosting Your Assignments on GitHub},
url = {https://www.michaeloverton.net/posts/2026-02-19-hosting-assignments-on-github/},
year = {2026}
}