Starting a Blog with Next.js and GitHub Pages

Hi! I’m Felix Carmona, developer. I’ve decided to create this blog to occasionally share useful tips and bits of knowledge I come across. Hopefully, some of it will be helpful to others.

When I started looking for a way to set up this blog, I wanted something simple and minimal—just enough to let me focus on the content without getting too caught up in the tech side of things.

After checking out static options like Jekyll and gatsby-starter-blog, I ended up forking overreacted.io. It originally started as a gatsby-starter-blog fork, but Dan Abramov, the creator, later rewrote it in Next.js.

If you’re interested in trying it out, you can fork the original repo from overreacted.io on GitHub.

To host it on GitHub Pages like I did, just enable Pages in your repo’s Settings under the Pages section (inside Code and Automation). Select GitHub Actions as the source, and you can also set up a custom domain there if you want.

Once GitHub Pages is set up, go to the Actions tab in your repo, click New Workflow, search for Next.js, and hit Configure.

You don’t need to change anything in the .github/workflows/nextjs.yml file, just commit it. From now on, any commit you push to the repo will automatically update your GitHub Pages site.

To test things before pushing changes, clone your repo and run:

npm install
npm run dev

This starts the blog at http://localhost:3000 , so you can see how it looks.

Enjoy!

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