Introduction

This tutorial aims at equipping you with the necessary skills to troubleshoot common issues that you may encounter when deploying, configuring, and managing your GitHub Pages. By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to diagnose and resolve the most common issues that can arise when using GitHub Pages.

Prerequisites:
You should have a basic understanding of Git and GitHub and have a GitHub account.

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Site Not Publishing

Sometimes, you may find that your site is not publishing as expected. This can be due to a number of reasons.

Issue: The GitHub Pages branch is not set to gh-pages.

Solution: Ensure you have the gh-pages branch in your repository and that this is the branch you are pushing your changes to.

2. Custom Domain Configuration Issues

Issue: Your custom domain is not directing to your GitHub Pages site.

Solution: Add a CNAME file to your repository which contains only the custom domain. Note that the CNAME file must be in the gh-pages branch for it to be recognized.

3. Branch Management Issues

Issue: You are unable to see your changes after pushing to the gh-pages branch.

Solution: It can take up to 10 minutes for changes to reflect on your GitHub Pages site. If changes are not reflecting after this time, you may have pushed to the wrong branch.

Code Examples

1. Creating a gh-pages branch:

# Navigate to your repository
cd my-repo

# Create a new branch called gh-pages
git branch gh-pages

# Switch to the gh-pages branch
git checkout gh-pages

2. Adding a CNAME file:

# Navigate to your repository
cd my-repo

# Create a new file named CNAME
echo "www.yourcustomdomain.com" > CNAME

# Add the CNAME file to git
git add CNAME

# Commit the change
git commit -m "Add CNAME file"

# Push the changes to the gh-pages branch
git push origin gh-pages

Summary

In this tutorial, we've covered how to troubleshoot common issues with GitHub Pages, including problems with site publishing, custom domain configuration, and branch management. If you continue to experience issues with GitHub Pages, refer to the GitHub Pages documentation.

Practice Exercises

1. Exercise: Create a new repository, add some basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to it, and try to publish it using GitHub Pages. What issues did you encounter and how did you resolve them?

2. Exercise: Try setting up a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site. What steps did you take to ensure it worked correctly?

3. Exercise: If you made changes to your site but they did not appear on the live site, what troubleshooting steps would you take to resolve the issue?

Solutions and Explanations:

1. Solution: This exercise is meant to give you hands-on experience with setting up a GitHub Pages site. You might encounter issues like forgetting to create a gh-pages branch, or not pushing your changes to the correct branch. These can be resolved by following the steps given in the tutorial.

2. Solution: To set up a custom domain, you need to add a CNAME file to your repository that contains your domain name. You also need to configure your domain provider's DNS settings to point to GitHub Pages.

3. Solution: If changes are not reflecting, you should first ensure you have waited long enough (up to 10 minutes). If the changes still don't appear, confirm you pushed to the correct branch (gh-pages), and that your site doesn't have any build errors.