Github Pages Dev Branch?

Question

I currently use the lovely Github Pages to host a website. I would now like to try out some stuff, adding content, new scripts, ... So I have a dev branch in which I do this, and run a local webserver to test it. Once I'm happy with it I can push it to the gh-pages branch for 'release'.

However, I was now wondering. Is it possible to have the dev branch also be reachable anywhere just like the gh-pages branch? This would be very helpful in letting other people try out the new stuff I'm working on without having to risk releasing buggy code to everyone. So basically two gh-pages sites in one repo, one for release one for development.

Is this (or something similar) possible with Github?

Answer 1

So going carefully through the github pages documentation seeking for any solution using the offered functionalty it seems what you are looking for might have been nice but is not available, maybe the closest thing is to have two repositories for example username.github.io/production and another one that is forking it like username.github.io/development and working on it while pushing changes back to the production one using pull requests or any technique you would prefer

And if you like you can check out my post and see some techniques of altering your websites, as well jekyll has a _drafts directory which allows staging of a post and seeing it before being posted.