Fixing my website after a recent Github Pages overhaul

So recently I started being a bit more active with personal projects — I did a paid project on the side, I decided to make a C++ hand tracking app on top of Mediapipe for fun, I started upgrading my Obsidian scripts again, I became just a bit more active with my posts on Telegram.

So I decided to check out my Github Pages website that I made like 1.5 years ago, and then completely forgot about.
TLDR: it wasn’t up, even though I didn’t change anything in those 1.5 years.

Well, turns out about a year ago Github updated their default guidelines for releasing Github Pages websites. It shouldn’t have broken anything, but I guess some vulnerabilities & other issues accumulated in my build workflow, and the workflow re-ran at some point and broke.

Github has good tutorials for pretty much everything, even for setting up your own Github Pages workflow.
However, the GitHub actions used in these examle tutorials, in particular actions/upload-pages-artifact and actions/deploy-pages were barely explained in the article, neither can you make sense of them while looking at their respective repositories
They provide all their examples assuming you build with Jekyll, which wasn’t the case for me — my website is built with Eleventy, and I didn’t find any tutorials on how to combine Eleventy with the new Github Pages. So I had to actually understand how these actions/upload-pages-artifact and actions/deploy-pages worked.

So, I’ll quickly break down the key concepts that were hard for me to pick up while figuring out the new workflows:

• The actions/deploy-pages that needs to be run at the end of your publishing workflow operates with some kind of artifact called github-pages.
• You do not need to know how this artifact system works — you only need to know that any artifact is produced via the special actions/upload-artifact action.
• actions/upload-pages-artifact makes a call to actions/upload-artifact inside
• actions/upload-pages-artifact takes in a parameter called path which should have your built static website in it. For me it was “docs/”, so the root of my website was in “docs/index.html”. This action converts your built static website into just the github-pages artifact that actions/deploy-pages needs.

With this in mind, it should be clear that the sequence of steps upload-pages-artifact -> deploy-pages just publishes your website built at path to Github Pages.

Hope this clears things up!