Publishing
Publishing is the deliberate step that turns your trial into a real, public course — hosted under your own account, and yours to keep even if you never open Alembic again.
What publishing does
Until you publish, your course lives in Alembic’s temporary storage. Publishing moves it out of Alembic and into your own space on GitHub — the same account you signed in with. Those repositories belong to you and are entirely independent of Alembic; GitHub Pages — GitHub’s own free website hosting — turns them into a live course website.
So Alembic is really just the bridge: it handles the setup and the transfer, but once your course is on GitHub, the site and its content live there on their own. If Alembic disappeared tomorrow, your published course would keep working — that is exactly why it’s built this way.
Publishing always needs your explicit approval. It never happens automatically, and listing a course publicly is a separate, equally deliberate choice.
This term
A published course has a “this term” area for the class you’re teaching now — announcements and assignments that are timely rather than timeless. When you start a new term, last term’s materials are kept for reference and the page moves on. It keeps the durable course clean while still serving today’s students.
Snapshots — cite exactly what you taught
Take a named snapshot each term (“Fall 2026”) and Alembic freezes the whole course at that moment. You can cite it, compare it against a later version, or restore it — while your everyday edits keep moving forward. See Citing, versions & links.