10 GitHub Pages Examples and Templates to Customize with Copilot

Static site hosting offers speed, security, and low maintenance, making it the standard choice for developer portfolios, project documentation, and personal blogs. GitHub Pages provides a native platform to serve these files directly from a repository. However, starting from a blank page is rarely efficient, which is why developers turn to pre-built templates. Finding the right repository to clone is the first step toward launching a site.

Here is a structured list of five common types of GitHub Pages templates, along with recommended repositories that you can copy and customize:

1. Personal Portfolios and Resumes

• al-folio (alshedivat/al-folio): A feature-heavy portfolio designed for academics and researchers, supporting dark mode, Google Scholar integration, and bibliography lists.
• Academic Pages (academicpages/academicpages.github.io): A clean, modular layout built specifically for hosting academic CVs, teaching histories, and research publications.

2. Blogs and Content Sites

• Chirpy (cotes2020/jekyll-theme-chirpy): A fast, minimalist blog theme featuring built-in local search, dark mode toggles, post categories, and tag paths.
• Beautiful Jekyll (daattali/beautiful-jekyll): A beginner-friendly Jekyll theme designed to get a blog running in minutes without complex setups.

3. Product and Project Landing Pages

• Start Bootstrap Clean Blog (startbootstrap/startbootstrap-clean-blog): A responsive theme featuring clean typography, header backgrounds, and simple layouts.
• Astrofy (sbado/astrofy): A modern portfolio and landing page template built with Astro and Tailwind CSS for developers preferring JavaScript frameworks.

4. Documentation and Project Wikis

• Just the Docs (just-the-docs/just-the-docs): A highly usable Jekyll theme for documentation, offering multi-level navigation, page search, and custom alerts.
• Docusaurus (facebook/docusaurus): A powerful documentation platform that you can build locally and publish to GitHub Pages, featuring localization and versioning.

5. Developer and Minimalist Layouts

• Minimal Mistakes (mmistakes/minimal-mistakes): A highly configurable Jekyll theme supporting multiple layout options, sidebars, and custom comment systems.
• Jekyll Now (barryclark/jekyll-now): A bare-bones template that eliminates the local build step, allowing site creation by editing a configuration file in a browser.

Each of these examples provides a foundation. But a template remains generic until you modify its configuration and style sheets to reflect your personal work.

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More on this subject: GitHub Copilot (89 guides)

Creating your site requires selecting an existing template or creating a new repository on GitHub. If you choose an existing theme repository, look for the green button labeled Use this template. This action copies the entire file structure into a new repository under your own GitHub account, maintaining a clean commit history without retaining the original project history. Alternatively, you can clone the repository to your local machine using the command line and push it to a new repository.

When setting up your repository, visibility depends on your GitHub plan. If the account that owns the repository uses GitHub Free or GitHub Free for organizations, the repository must be public. For paid accounts, you can keep the source code repository private while keeping the published page public. To set this up, go to your account, click the plus icon, and create a repository as outlined in the official GitHub Pages quickstart.

Once the repository is active, configure the basic site settings. Jekyll-based templates rely on a central file named _config.yml located in the root directory. This configuration file contains variables for your site title, author name, social links, and navigation menus. Opening this file in your editor allows you to replace default values with your own profile data. For non-Jekyll frameworks, settings are typically managed in files like astro.config.mjs or docusaurus.config.js. Correctly specifying these parameters ensures that internal links and assets resolve when the build runner publishes the files.

Before pushing your changes, it is good practice to test the template locally. For Jekyll sites, this involves installing Ruby dependencies and running the local server. For modern node-based static generators like Astro, you run a local development command. Testing locally allows you to verify that images and styling render correctly before deploying to production.

Modifying stylesheets and layouts manually can be time-consuming. You can use GitHub Copilot to accelerate these changes. To help the model generate code that fits your project, add a custom instructions file named .github/copilot-instructions.md to your repository. This file details your design standards, style preferences, and build details.

When asking Copilot to write layout elements, provide specific instructions. Instead of asking for a general website edit, use descriptive prompts that specify layouts and tags. For example, you can write:

Create a responsive biography section featuring a circular headshot aligned to the left, a short paragraph of text to the right, and social icon links below the text. Use flexbox for alignment and ensure the text colors use the theme variable for primary body text.

If you are modifying Jekyll files, you can instruct Copilot to write Liquid tags that loop through lists. For instance, you can request:

Write a loop that reads files from the _posts directory and lists the titles of the three most recent posts, showing their publish dates next to the titles in a YYYY-MM-DD format.

Using these specific prompts prevents the model from generating incorrect code blocks or using style frameworks that are not part of your codebase. You can also run Copilot Chat in your editor to debug layout alignment issues or write custom CSS variables that change the default color scheme of the template. For example, if your template uses Tailwind CSS, you can ask Copilot to generate utility classes for a customized navigation bar that matches your brand colors. If you encounter CSS specificity conflicts, you can highlight the styles and ask the model to identify which rule is overriding your custom overrides.

Once you customize your files, you need to publish them to the web. GitHub Pages supports two deployment sources: publishing from a branch or using custom GitHub Actions workflows. If you publish your site from a source branch, GitHub Pages will use Jekyll to build your site by default. If you use a custom build process or a static site generator other than Jekyll, you can write a GitHub Actions workflow to build and publish your site.

GitHub Actions is now the recommended path for custom Pages builds. Using a workflow file gives you control over the build steps, handles node dependency installation, and logs any build errors during execution. To set up this deployment method, go to your repository settings, select the Pages tab under the code and automation section, and select GitHub Actions in the build and deployment source dropdown.

Here is a standard workflow configuration for deploying static HTML files or built assets:

name: Deploy Static Site
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write
concurrency:
  group: "pages"
  cancel-in-progress: true
jobs:
  deploy:
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Source Code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Configure Pages Environment
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v4
      - name: Upload Build Artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
        with:
          path: '.'
      - name: Deploy Pages Site
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

This workflow configuration files are stored in .github/workflows/deploy.yml. When you push changes to your main branch, GitHub Actions executes these steps, bundles the files at the specified path, and deploys them to the GitHub CDN.

If you are using a static site generator that outputs files to a specific directory (like dist or build), modify the path parameter in the upload step to point to that directory. If you are deploying pre-compiled files without using Jekyll, create an empty file named .nojekyll in the root of your publishing source. This file tells GitHub Pages to bypass the default Jekyll build process, preventing it from ignoring folders that start with underscores, which is common in node-based builds.

Coordinate your GitHub Pages assets in a shared workspace

Provide a central workspace with an MCP-ready endpoint for your agent's reads and writes, keeping project files searchable and versioned. Every organization starts with a 14-day free trial, which requires a credit card. Plans are Starter at $29/mo, Business at $99/mo, and Growth at $299/mo.

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Developing templates with multiple people or AI agents requires a way to coordinate files. Traditional cloud drives or local network folders are often used to share code and assets. However, these human-centric storage tools lack the version history, real-time activity feeds, and agent tools necessary to support automated software development. Teams need a developer-friendly workspace to manage assets.

Fast.io provides a collaborative workspace designed for teams working with AI agents. Instead of managing complex directory syncing or dealing with merge conflicts in binary files, you can connect your environment to a shared workspace. To learn how to configure your storage, visit the agent storage page. Fast.io indexes your files automatically, making them searchable by name or text content.

You can connect your AI coding assistants directly to the workspace. Fast.io exposes action-based Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools for file storage, AI metadata extraction, and semantic search. To configure your agent, add the workspace endpoint in your configuration file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fastio-workspace": {
      "url": "https://mcp.fast.io/mcp/key"
    }
  }
}

By connecting your tools to https://mcp.fast.io/mcp/key, agents can read and write assets, update configuration files, and search project resources. Since Fast.io retains a complete per-file version history, you can restore prior versions if an agent introduces syntax errors. The workspace also uses granular permissions to restrict agent access to specific directories. When an agent finishes building a site mock-up, it can transfer ownership of the workspace to a human teammate while maintaining an activity log of all edits. For details on configuring API access and authentication, view the Fast.io pricing page and configure your workspace credentials. This setup ensures that your templates remain safe, searchable, and collaborative.