Publish with Github Pages Keeping repo as Private on free plan

[shemeerp]

Hi,

I have a free plan. I have to host site with github pages. I have purchased a theme, so I need to make the code/repo private. Can I host on Github pages keeping the repo as private ? My Site will be available publicly

Thanks,

Shemeer

[Joness666]

i think yes, because you pay money

[RDIL]

No, to use GitHub pages on a private repository, you need the PRO plan.

[javiyadeep]

i have pro plan but i can't do host

[blakete]

@RDIL Can you do it with the Team plan or only on the Enterprise plan?

[makerofgames]

@shemeerp wrote:

Hi,

I have a free plan. I have to host site with github pages. I have purchased a theme, so I need to make the code/repo private. Can I host on Github pages keeping the repo as private ? My Site will be available publicly

 

Thanks,

Shemeer

Hey friend, if you dont find your answer in github then i wanted to say that there are free hostings (even fully working ones without ads) or very cheap ones not exceeding few dollars yearly.

Cheers

[nyahbhinghiPrincess]

Hi @fairol85,

Thank you for reaching out in this thread!   You are more likely to get a useful response if you are explicit or give a few more details in your question. Please let us know what information you are looking for or asking about.

[KyleStay]

I have a PRO plan, but I’m still getting this message in my repo. Has something changed?

[phexus23]

No, it is normal, happens to all people.

[rivermont]

I had the same scenario, but when I confirmed and reloaded it now displays this:

image.png786×314 13.1 KB

So it looks like even though it says you will lose it, the site stays up. My site did not go down after I made the repo private. The message is quite confusing though.

[amitmerchant1990]

Curious is it still working with the private repo?

[shornabho]

Hey @rivermont, what Github means by that message is that, since the repository is private, people will not have access to the Github repository of the site code directly after you publish it with Github Pages. However, since the published site is public (can be accessed by anyone on the Internet) and Github only allows static sites, the code for the site will technically be available to the public, as anyone can view the Page Source of the published site to view the relevant code files and assets.

I hope this answers your doubt.

[phatty88]

"the code for the site will technically be available to the public, as anyone can view the Page Source of the published site to view the relevant code files and assets."

would people be able to see api keys that were put in dotenv files even if you have a private account ?
sorry i am new to coding so im just trying to understand security a little more :(

[shornabho]

Hi @phatty88,

As a general rule of thumb, consider any and every line of code you write in a frontend codebase always gets shipped to the client system for web interfaces in some way or form once you deploy it. Whether you have your API Keys in a dotenv or not, is just a coding best practice for larger environments to avoid code changes for multi-tenant or multi-environment deployments, such as you may want different deployment configs (API Keys, etc.) for production, development, staging environments.

But most public APIs will have some security mechanism to ensure others cannot use the same API Key or Access Tokens such as domain-based filters on the backend. For example, your API backend might only choose to accept requests from blog.example.com and so if I steal your API Key and try to call the same API, since I don't own blog.example.com your backend API will not send me a valid response. Similarly for public APIs, or OAuth2 IDPs or OIDC partners they usually have a set of valid origins and valid redirect URIs that you can configure in the platform / app before you can use a particular set of access tokens.

Hope this answers your question.