How to serve a custom HTTPS domain on GitHub Pages with CloudFlare: *FREE*, secure and performant by default

HOWTO.md

Instructions

CloudFlare is an awesome reverse cache proxy and CDN that provides DNS, free HTTPS (TLS) support, best-in-class performance settings (gzip, SDCH, HTTP/2, sane Cache-Control and E-Tag headers, etc.), minification, etc.

1. Make sure you have registered a domain name.
2. Sign up for CloudFlare and create an account for your domain.
3. In your domain registrar's admin panel, point the nameservers to CloudFlare's (refer to this awesome list of links for instructions for various registrars).
4. From the CloudFlare settings for that domain, enable HTTPS/SSL and set up a Page Rule to force HTTPS redirects. (If you want to get fancy, you can also enable automatic minification for text-based assets [HTML/CSS/JS/SVG/etc.], which is a pretty cool feature if you don't want already have a build step for minification.)
5. If you don't already have one, create a new repository on GitHub to store your site's contents (preferably in the form of static web pages and assets; though not necessary, for the A-Frame site we use a static-site generator called Hexo).
6. From your domain registrar's settings, create a CNAME record to point <domain>.<tld> to <user>.github.io. (Refer to the GitHub docs for more information.)
7. In your Github repo, create a file at the root called CNAME containing the domain name (e.g., aframe.io).
8. Push to GitHub Pages (either by pushing to gh-pages or master of your repo; or you can use the master branch of a repo named <org>.github.io - example: https://github.com/aframevr/aframevr.github.io/ automatically gets published to https://aframevr.github.io/, which redirects to https://aframe.io/)
9. You're done! All content will now be served to your users from CloudFlare.