Host static websites on Incremental Social

Host your portfolio website, web-based game, documentation, or any other static content by just placing it in a public repository on Incremental Social Code, all for free.

Canonical URLs

The server will respond to requests to 4 different types of URLs:

  • https://raw.pages.incremental.social/USERNAME/REPONAME/ will return raw content with correct MIME types and is accessible with CORS. Requests for HTML files are ignored (use the non-RAW domains for that).
  • https://USERNAME.pages.incremental.social will return the website hosted on the default branch of your pages repository.
  • https://USERNAME.pages.incremental.social/REPONAME will return the website hosted on the pages branch of the repository.
  • https://example.com; custom domains can be configured as described below.

In all cases, you can append a branch using an @ (e.g. https://raw.pages.incremental.social/USERNAME/REPONAME/@develop/package.json). If the branch name contains a slash (/), they need to be replaced with a tilde (~).

Pushing the Content

You can either directly push your static files (index.html and any resources it accesses) to the pages branch (or the default branch on your pages repository), or setup a workflow to do so for you automatically. For example, thepaperpilot's portfolio website automatically builds the site and pushes it to the default branch. You can view that workflow file here. Notice that the default branch for that repository is the pages branch - source code gets pushed to master, and the workflow pushes the build output to pages.

Custom Domains

  1. Add a .domains text file to the branch being served, containing the allowed domains separated by new lines. The first line will be the canonical domain/URL; all other occurrences will be redirected to it.
  2. Go to your DNS records. Add a CNAME entry to your domain, pointing to [[BRANCH.]REPO.]USERNAME.pages.incremental.social. REPO defaults to pages and BRANCH defaults to the default branch if on your pages repo, and the pages branch otherwise. If the branch contains slashes (/), you need to replace each with tildes (~).
    Example: www.example.com. IN CNAME main.pages.example.pages.incremental.social.
  4. If a CNAME is set for "www.example.com", you can redirect there from the naked/apex domain (without the www) by adding a TXT record pointed to the same URL as your CNAME entry. You'll also need to add an ALIAS record for "example.com", or if that's not available then make an A record pointing to 5.78.64.156 and an AAAA record pointing to 2a01:4ff:1f0:85d1::1.
    Example: example.com IN ALIAS pages.incremental.social. example.com IN TXT main.pages.example.pages.incremental.social.

Other help

For more information on how hosting sites works, you can reference the Codeberg Pages documentation - Incremental Social is using the same underlying platform. You can also ask for help via any of the Incremental Social or the pages-server Matrix channel.