I’ve been developing swedishelf(a CLI tool for learning Swedish) that requires downloading dictionary files from a separate GitHub repository during runtime. This presented a challenge: how could I ensure users worldwide experience fast and reliable downloads regardless of their geographic location?

The Challenge

When directly downloading files from GitHub repositories, users in different regions may experience varying download speeds due to geographic distance from GitHub’s servers. For a CLI tool that needs to fetch resources on-demand, this could result in poor user experience, especially for users in regions far from GitHub’s primary infrastructure.

GitHub Pages offers a free and robust platform for hosting personal blogs. There are several static site generators available for this purpose. Hugo is particularly well-suited for technical blogs due to its performance, flexibility, and extensive theme library. This guide will be demonstrated mainly on Windows and is intended for beginners with basic familiarity with Git and command-line operations.

Steps

Create a GitHub Pages repo