Publish your book online¶

Once you’ve built the HTML for your book, you can host it online. The best way to do this is with a service that hosts static websites (because that’s what you have just created with Jupyter Book). There are many options for doing this, and these sections cover some of the more popular ones.

Source vs build files¶

At this point, you have created a combination of Jupyter notebooks, markdown files, and configuration files, including _toc.yml and _config.yml. These files are your source files. The source files comprise all of the content and configuration that Jupyter Book needs to build your book.

The _build folder contains all of your static website build files. The build files contain all of the output from Jupyter Book’s build command. These files are only used to view your content in a browser.

Best practice for publishing your book is to keep two branches in your git project:

Your book’s source files that you create to build the book
Your book’s build files that Jupyter Book created to view the book

Create an online repository for your book¶

Regardless of the approach you use for publishing your book online, it will require you to host your book’s content in an online repository such as GitHub. This section describes one approach you can use to create your own GitHub repository and add your book’s content to it.

First, log in to GitHub, then go to the “create a new repository” page: https://github.com/new
Next, give your online repository a name and a description. Make your repository public and do not initialize it with a README file, then click “Create repository”.
Now, clone the (currently empty) online repository to a location on your local computer. You can do this via the command line with:
```
git clone https://github.com/<my-org>/<my-repository-name>
```
Copy all of your book files and folders into this newly cloned repository. For example, if you created your book locally with jupyter-book create mylocalbook and your new repository is called myonlinebook, you could do this via the command line with:
```
cp -r mylocalbook/* myonlinebook/
```
Now you need to sync your local and remote (i.e., online) repositories. You can do this with the following commands:
```
cd myonlinebook
git add ./*
git commit -m "adding my first book!"
git push
```

Follow the steps in the next sections to learn how to host your book online with various online hosting services.

Data Science Study

Publish your book online¶

Source vs build files¶

Create an online repository for your book¶