Getting Github Pages To Work With A Dreamhost Domain

So there are a couple of articles on this but I found them all only mildly helpful. The result is my site went down for an hour while I was like OMG 😱. So I’m writing this so you don’t have to have this same experience.

Here was my situation:

Site was set up as a Github project page
I was using Gatsby and gh-pages

The documentation on this on Github is a certified documentation horror story and incomprehensible to normal or even experienced people. Basically you only need 4 things:

Set your dreamhost domain to DNS only — this allows you to create the DNS Cname for WWW, otherwise you can’t do this.

Create a Cname record for www and add A records for the github pages domains. Your records should look like this:

Set your Github pages to the custom domain of www.yourdomain.com NOT yourdomain.com. This will create a CNAME file. Um don’t let your deployment process delete this!

OK here is the final step no one seems to have documented anywhere. www.yourdomain.com should now work, what about yourdomain.com? It’s just easiest to redirect it at this point. Go to Dreamhost and click “Manage Domains” then “Add Hosting to a Domain/Sub Domain” (I know…this makes no sense). Scroll down and you’ll see “Redirect.” This is what you need: