does.software

Where to publish your final-year project under your own name

Put your final project online for the presentation and for your CV. What works for a static site, what to do if it has a backend and how to do it as a group.

Reviewed

On presentation day nobody is going to clone your repository. They want to open a link and see the project working, and the same goes later for the internship company or your first interview. This guide is about making sure that link exists, is short and carries your name.

What your project needs to be shown

Two things, a live demo that works without installing anything and the repository with a README that explains what it is and how to run it. The demo is what gets seen in five minutes. The repository is what someone who wants to know how you code looks at.

Both fit in a name like yourname.does.software, the root for the demo and a path like /repo that leads to GitHub. It is easy to say out loud and fits on the last slide.

If it is a static site (HTML, Angular, React, Vue)

does.software serves static files over HTTPS. If your project is HTML, CSS and JavaScript, or an Angular, React or Vue app, you can publish it as it is. Nothing gets compiled here, so what you upload is the build output, the dist/ folder, not the source code.

Web hosting comes with the Starter plan, the Pro plan, the 14-day trial and the schools' Edu plan. The free plan does not include it, but it can redirect your name to a site you already have somewhere else.

  1. Build on your machine and check there is an index.html at the root of what you are going to upload.
  2. On your subdomain, switch the mode to website and upload the ZIP, or import the repository from GitHub or GitLab.
  3. If it is a single-page app, leave the single-page application box ticked so that reloading a route does not fail. It usually switches on by itself when it sees the deploy.
  4. Turn on deploy on every push if you want the demo to update itself right up to presentation day. The GitHub guide walks through it step by step.

If it has a backend (PHP, Node, Java, a database)

No server code runs here, a .php is not accepted and there is no database. If your project has a backend, that part has to live on a host that runs it, and quite a few have a free or student plan.

What you can do is put the frontend here and have it call your API deployed elsewhere, or simply redirect your name to wherever the whole app lives. The redirect works on the free plan, so you get the short link with your name either way.

If you are doing it as a group

If your school uses does.software, your teacher can create a group of up to 8 people from your class with a shared subdomain that you all manage. You connect the repository, every push publishes the site and your teacher sees each person's commits and the group's deploys. It is all on the page for schools.

If your school does not use it, the simplest thing is for one person in the group to claim the name and connect the team's repository. Every push to the deploy branch publishes the new version, whoever makes it.

Before the presentation

What is worth checking a couple of days before, not on the morning itself.

  1. Open the demo from another device and on another network, not just from your laptop.
  2. Leave test data in and, if there is a login, a demo user with its password in the README.
  3. Check that reloading any page does not fail and that no placeholder text is left.
  4. Put the short link on the title slide and on the last one.
  5. Record a video of the demo in case the classroom connection fails.

A live demo and a repository with a README, behind a name you can say out loud. If it is static, upload it here. If it has a backend, deploy it where it can run and point your name there.

Claim your name Or back to Static sites

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