Create a Blog on GitHub with Markdown in 15-Minutes

By Joel Dare - Written April 1, 2026

If you want to start a blog, are familiar with Git, and like writing in Markdown, this may work for you. Follow these directions and you’re blog will be online in 15-minutes. I’ve broken the process down to three basic steps:

Clone the example repo
Push to your GitHub account
Publish with GitHub Pages

1. Clone the example repo

First, we’ll clone an example repo into a local directory called /blog. Open a terminal and run the following commands.

git clone git@github.com:codazoda/blog-template.git blog \
&& cd blog \
&& rm -rf .git

2. Push to your GitHub account

Next, we’ll push our repository to GitHub.

Open the GitHub New Repository page.
Click the Create repository button to create your new repo on GitHub.
Back in your terminal, run the following commands to push to GitHub.

IMPORTANT: Replace YOUR_USERNAME with your GitHub username.

git init
git add .
git commit -m 'start my blog'
git branch -M main
git remote add origin git@github.com:YOUR_USERNAME/blog.git
git push -u origin main

3. Publish with GitHub Pages

Finally, we want to publish the page.

Return to the GitHub page you opened in step-2.
Go to Settings > Pages.
Under Branch select main from the drop-down, then click Save.
Wait 5-minutes and refresh.

It takes a couple minutes for GitHub to build and publish your new site. As soon as it’s finished it will show a Visit site link at the top of the page. Once it’s there, click the link to open your new blog.

Congratulations, your blog is online!

Update then push

Anytime you make changes, you can now run git push to push those changes live. It takes a couple minutes for GitHub to build the site each time you push. One it does, your changes should be live.

Going Further

Now that you have a blog there is much more that you can do, including setting up your own custom domain name, editing the style, and more.