GitHub Pages 29 serves static files over HTTPS from GitHub 29 's CDN. A user site comes from a repository named <user>.github.io; every other repository can have a project site under a path, so BookNest's lives at https://binarybehemoth.github.io/booknest/ 126 . Pages is free for public repositories on every plan, and for private ones on Pro, Team and Enterprise Cloud. Sites may be at most 1 GB, deployments time out after 10 minutes, and soft limits of 100 GB of bandwidth a month and 10 builds an hour apply; GitHub forbids using Pages to run an online business or SaaS.
A site is published from a branch (optionally through Jekyll 12,532 ) or from a workflow that uploads any folder, so the site can be built. BookNest's is the front end in public/ plus a static copy of the catalog at api/books; documentation from a generator such as MkDocs 52,967 or Docusaurus 103,372 ships the same way. The front end now fetches the relative api/books, which resolves to /api/books on the Express 24,430 server and to /booknest/api/books on Pages.
Pages runs no server code, so the search box's ?q= filters nothing here. Custom domains are set under Settings > Pages with a DNS record; verify the domain for your account first, so no one else can claim it.