⑦ Deploying Your Website Online: From Local to Live in 3 Minutes

Have you ever had a moment like this — your project runs beautifully on your local machine, you want to send it to a friend to show off, and all you can do is send a screenshot? Or something even more painful: an interviewer says “send me a link to your work,” and all you can reply is “it's still local…”

Something you worked this hard on shouldn't be visible only to you.

Today, in the final instalment of this series, we solve exactly that — move your project from local to online and give it a web page that users in mainland China can open.

Deploy your site in one click with EdgeOne, Tencent Cloud's edge security acceleration platform

In one sentence: free, loads instantly in mainland China, and once connected to GitHub it redeploys automatically whenever the branch synchronises.

You may have heard of Vercel or Netlify. They're excellent too, but they have one serious flaw — they load very slowly in mainland China, and sometimes won't open at all. EdgeOne Pages is an edge deployment platform under Tencent Cloud, with a large number of nodes inside mainland China, so you never have to worry about load speed. And — it's accessible both inside and outside China, unlike some platforms where, after deployment, people abroad can see the site but nobody in mainland China can open it.

Most importantly: it binds to GitHub. Just push your code to GitHub and EdgeOne detects the change and redeploys automatically — you don't have to do anything.

“Push your code to GitHub, run your site on EdgeOne — you just write; deployment is the platform's job.”

Step by step: from zero to live in 3 steps

Step 1: push your code to a GitHub repository

Your project code first needs to live in a repository on a Git platform (such as GitHub). You can bind a GitHub repository directly in Google AI Studio and have commit syncing enabled automatically.

Step 2: connect the repository to EdgeOne

Open the EdgeOne Pages console and sign in with your Tencent Cloud account; click “Create Project” → choose a Git platform (such as GitHub) → import an existing repository; authorise access to GitHub and select your project repository; the framework preset is detected automatically (Vite, Next.js, for example), so no manual configuration is needed; click “Deploy” and wait about 30 seconds.

Once the deployment finishes, EdgeOne gives you a random domain — now anyone who opens that link can see your work! (Valid for 3 hours)

Step 3: keep the repository up to date

From then on, every time you change the code, push it promptly to the bound repository branch. EdgeOne detects the GitHub update and redeploys automatically. You write; it goes live.

Want a long-term domain? The filing has to be prepared in advance

The free domain EdgeOne gives you is handy for trying things out and testing. But it's only valid for 3 hours. If you want a long-term, stable domain of your own, you can simply buy one directly from Tencent Cloud or Alibaba Cloud — a first-year newcomer discount gets it for 8~32 yuan, a year's use for the price of a cup of milk tea.

Still, buying a domain doesn't mean you can use it — there's one more thing you have to know in advance:

In mainland China, using a custom domain requires two filings, and the prerequisite for filing is that you have bought a cloud server (a lightweight application server from Tencent Cloud or Alibaba Cloud, for instance). Without a server you cannot submit a filing application.

⚠️ Mind the order: you must complete the ICP filing and deploy it to the website before you can apply for the public security filing, and it must be done within 30 days of the site going live.

So if you plan to show your project to an interviewer or a client on a custom domain, start the process at least 3~4 weeks in advance — buy a domain → buy a server → ICP filing → public security filing; every step has a waiting period. I'm not trying to scare you; it really is that slow.

A practical tip for beginners: first put the project online with the free domain EdgeOne gives you and send it to people to look at. Handle the filing in parallel, and switch the bound domain once it's done — neither gets held up.

Today's action checklist

✅ Push your project code to GitHub (create a repository first if you don't have one)

✅ Sign in to EdgeOne Pages and bind the GitHub repository holding your project

✅ Once the first deployment is done, send the link to a friend and test whether it opens

✅ Get used to the new workflow: change the code → commit and push to the repository branch → automatic update

✅ If you need a custom domain: start looking up the ICP filing and public security filing procedures right away

Series finale: how far we've come together

If you've followed along since episode one, look back:

localhost → AI Studio → GitHub → EdgeOne → visible to the whole internet

You started with nothing more than an idea — “I want to build a little tool” — and now you have a complete capability chain from development to deployment. You didn't just learn a tool; you learned a method.

“What runs locally is a project; what runs online is a piece of work.”

Across these 7 instalments we haven't been talking about “how to use some piece of software,” but about —

You have an idea → you know how to build it → you know how to show it to the world.

That is what a real “zero basics to live, full chain” path looks like.