How to host your Twitter archive for free

01 Dec 2016

You’ve been able to download your full Twitter archive for a few years now. This is great if you want to search locally through all your tweets. But what if you want to share your archive with the world?

Luckily Github Pages offers free hosting for static web pages. Here’s how to quickly set this up. For now I’ll be using the desktop version of GitHub but I might add in the commandline process at a later date.

Firstly you’ll need a GitHub account so create one if you don’t have one or log in and then create a new repository called tweets or something like that.

Open the GitHub desktop client on your computer and clone the tweets repository (using the little + sign in the top left) to wherever you like.

Now unzip your Twitter archive into the repository folder. Then you can commit the changes by adding a brief summary and clicking “commit to master”. Then hit “Publish” or “Sync” up the top right. Wait a little while because this may take a few minutes to upload.

Next go to your GitHub account in your web browser and navigate to your tweets repository. Then click “Settings” and scroll down to the “GitHub Pages” section. Select “master branch” from the dropdown box and hit “Save”.

That should be it. It may take up to 5 minutes for your site to be live but after that you should be good to go.

Anyway here’s my Twitter archive to check out how it should look in the end.