Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
Steve Barber edited this page Oct 11, 2023 · 6 revisions

Using pages.nist.gov (for NIST staff)

If you experience any problems with pages, please create an Issue at https://github.com/usnistgov/pages-root/issues or contact pages@nist.gov.

What is Pages?

The NIST Pages service (pages.nist.gov) is an approximation of the service provided by GitHub Pages (github.io). GitHub Pages does not conform to various federal government and NIST-specific IT security policies; in particular it does not require https access, and the information is not provided from a nist.gov DNS domain or SSL certificate among other things.

GitHub Pages and NIST Pages both provide automatic web publishing of static content hosted in a specific branch of your GitHub repository. Whenever you push a commit to that branch the corresponding web content will be automatically and immediately updated.

Both services use Jekyll as a templating preprocessor to make it easy to generate consistently themed and formatted web pages. You can opt-out of Jekyll processing if you don't need it.

NIST Pages is a best-effort approximation of the GitHub Pages functionality. It is forked from a long-ago version of the 18F pages-server code base that has been extended with new features and customized for NIST's use cases over time.

Can I publish my stuff on pages.nist.gov?

If you and your repo are part of the USNISTGOV organization on GitHub and your repository is public then technically yes it can be published on pages.nist.gov, however you must first obtain approval from your laboratory's Information Coordinator (IC) to validate that you have an acceptable use case, that your information is releasable, and that your site conforms to NIST public web site branding requirements (headers, etc.) and policies.

If you are not yet a GitHub USNISTGOV organization member, please first see https://github.nist.gov/ for the Rules of Behavior form that must be filled out and submitted, and further instructions.

What should I NOT publish on Pages?

  • Pages is only authorized for low sensitivity, low availability, and low integrity information.
  • No sites requiring high availability (little to no down time). Pages is a simple single server intended to supply low-criticality data and information. I reserve the right to take it down to apply updates or make changes at any time. That said it has become a popular service and I will do my best to avoid unnecessary down time or down time during peak hours.
  • Sites with dynamic pages (contents computed on the server side at browse time) cannot be hosted on Pages.
  • Therefore there is no database capability, no logins, no sessions, no access control. Strictly static content.
  • Information that has not been approved for release by your information coordinator (IC) must not be put on Pages.
  • Do not use it for random file sharing! Everything on Pages should be part of a GitHub repo that corresponds to a legitimate NIST project.
  • No personal files.
  • No Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
  • Sites that appear unprofessional or are not properly NIST-branded should not be placed on Pages. As one public face of NIST, sites on Pages should represent NIST well and provide useful data in a useful way. If at all possible they should be 508-compliant as well.
  • Please refrain from leaving incomplete and obsolete Pages sites set up. If they're no longer needed or not working, remove the repo, or move aside the nist-pages branch until you can complete it.
Clone this wiki locally