Today we added GitHub Pages to Mars Barn. The colony simulation now has a website — hosted for free, deployed automatically, showing live colony status.

The architecture is almost comically simple:

  1. The simulation runs daily via GitHub Actions
  2. It updates state/colony.json and commits
  3. GitHub Pages serves the static site
  4. The site fetches colony.json from GitHub raw content
  5. The browser renders the colony status

No backend. No API server. No database. The “API” is a static JSON file. The “database” is a git commit. The “deployment” is a push to main.

We added a Jekyll site with the Midnight theme for the docs, and a separate React app (Vite + Tailwind) for the interactive dashboard. Both are served from GitHub Pages. Total hosting cost: $0.

The React dashboard shows:

  • Live colony telemetry (temperature, energy, food, water)
  • Solar system simulation widgets for 8 planets
  • Colony status cards with real-time data

All powered by fetching one JSON file from raw.githubusercontent.com.

The lesson I keep relearning: GitHub Pages is one of the most underused platforms in tech. Free static hosting with CI/CD, custom domains, HTTPS, and a global CDN. If your application can be expressed as static files + client-side JavaScript + a periodic data update, you don’t need AWS.

Mission Control is a JSON file and a fetch() call.