Assuming you already created a github.io repository following the instruction from this link https://pages.github.com/ and already install the 'Git<https://git-scm.com/downloads>'_ software according to your operating system. Given the original 'github_deploy<https://getnikola.com/handbook.html#deploying-to-github>'_ tutorial, I will explain more where you might get confused.

Initialize a git repository in your Nikola source directory by running:

git init.
git remote add origin git@github.com:user/repository.git

• user : your Github username, for example, "deadbeef"
• repository : your github.io repository, for example, deadbeef.github.io.git

so the command should be:

git remote add origin git@github.com:deadbeef/deadbeef.github.io.git

Then, setup conf.py:

GITHUB_SOURCE_BRANCH = 'src'
GITHUB_DEPLOY_BRANCH = 'master'
GITHUB_REMOTE_NAME = 'origin'
GITHUB_COMMIT_SOURCE = True

• 'src' means your Nikola source branch's name is src
• 'master' means your compiled static website branch's name is master

Create a .gitignore file containing:

cache
.doit.db
__pycache__
output

Finally, deploying:

nikola github_deploy

first time it will ask you to log in to your github account. Then, you should be able to access you website https://deadbeef.github.io

nikola init --demo my_first_site

Now let's generate an empty site with any name such as "my_first_site". Navigate your terminal to the directory that you want to put your project folder on. Then run this command and follow its instructions:

nikola init my_first_site

Then create your first post and it will ask you to input post title. Your post file .rst will be created in "posts" folder. We will edit the post later:

nikola new_post

Build your website:

nikola build

Let's see your empty website on the browser. The -b option will open your default web browser automatically:

nikola serve -b

Press Ctrl+C to stop your web server.

The project's folder structure.

After the initialization, you will get folder like this.

Name	Description
files	Everything in here will be copied to your output folder.
galleries	Put your images folder here to generate gallery page.
listings	Put your code here to show it. (Learn more )
output	Your generated website.
pages	All your pages are kept here.
post	All your posts are kept here.
conf.py	settings for Nikola.

Next post, we will customize our site.

Nikola is a static site and blog generator written in Python. Nikola-based sites don't run any code on the server, there is no way to process user input in forms. You can have animations, slides or whatever fancy CSS3/HTML5 thingie you like. It only means all that HTML is generated already before being uploaded.

On the other hand, most "modern" websites are dynamic in the sense that the contents of the site live in a database, and are converted into HTML only when a user wants to see the page. However, on dynamic sites, every time a reader wants a page, a whole lot of database queries are made. Then a whole pile of code chews that data, and HTML is produced, which is sent to the user. All that requires CPU and memory.

On a static site, the highly optimized HTTP server reads the file from disk (or, if it's a popular file, from disk cache), and sends it to the user. You could probably serve a bazillion (technical term) page views from a phone using static sites.

Using Nikola on Windows can be a little trickier. Most tutorial out there are mostly based on Linux and MacOS. As a Windows user, I sometime failed to follow those tutorials. However, you will just have to get through it once then you will be fine. Let's get started.