How do project Pages work?

[blueglyph]

I'm new to GitHub pages and I'm trying to understand how this works for project pages (NOT the personal Pages site "{username}.github.io" repository).

I tried the tutorial but it wasn't working, and it uses a template workflow. Besides, it doesn't explain much. I saw that it created a new my-pages branch where it created the empty _config.yml, and a basic index.md - which, contrary to the explanation, is not visible when looking at the published site, only the README.md is (with a very bad formatting and missing images).

If I activate Pages on an existing project, without adding any workflow, I see that the README.md is automatically translated into a static website. I think that it's done by a version of Jekyll used by an automatic flow on GitHub. The site is visible and fine, but what is generated is inaccessible - no branch or file created, nothing is visible from the Actions pages, and I didn't find any doc on this. Everything is focused on the personal pages.

• Can we rely on this project automatic workflow, and is it possible to configure the style and so on?
• Or are we supposed to always use Jekyll to generate the content?
• Does Jekyll work with project pages too? Is there some doc I missed about it?

[sinsukehlab]

The course works quite well. Let me explain.
Published sites are NOT Git repositories.
The index page is not visible at first because the GitHub Pages site is deployed from the main branch. The main branch doesn't contain index.md at first, so the published site displays README.md.
You are taught to edit the files in the my-pages branch, create and merge a PR from my-pages to main. When the commits pushed to the main branch, the GitHub Actions workflow 'pages build and deployment' runs to publish the site.

[blueglyph]

Thanks!

I see. But the merge is the final step, so why does it do all those build and deployment at every step in the Actions tab if there is nothing to deploy yet? The tutorial instructs to open the website, but I don't see the point if there's nothing worth seeing yet except a broken page.

To me, all that and the fact the website changes at each step suggests that the workflow publishes each modification and that my_pages is the link between the user's input in main and how the site is rendered.

The empty _config.yml file is suspicious too; once again, it seems in contradiction with what is mentioned elsewhere.

This is confusing at best, and doesn't explain anything much. It doesn't tell whether Jekyll can be used for project pages either, nor how. The first step to improve this tutorial, I think, would be to remove all these mysterious workflows to avoid unnecessary noise and confusion, and to present a realistic environment to the user.

Anyway, the tutorial was only anecdotic to my question, but now I know that my_pages is just an artefact of those custom tutorial scripts.

[sinsukehlab]

What do you mean by 'project pages'? Every repository in GitHub can have a GitHub Pages site deployed from a branch if set properly.
The workflows are not mysterious. They just update steps in README.md.
Any changes to the content are usually made on a newly created branch. You merge the branch to the main branch when it is ready.
You are expected to merge the my-pages branch to the main branch after creating a blog post in this course.

[blueglyph]

There are 3 types of GitHub pages: user, project and organization.

You're missing my point. Thanks for the help, but let's see if someone else has some answers.

[sinsukehlab]

You get one site per GitHub account and organization, and unlimited project sites using GitHub Pages.
This course will publish a project site unless you generate a repository named 'blueglyph.github.io' from the template repository.
You have published a project site.
See: https://pages.github.com/

[blueglyph]

Please stop trying to help, because you're not answering my questions. I don't care about the damn tutorial!

[blueglyph]

Anyway, I've learned that Jekyll was apparently automatically used with GitHub pages and that it was a pretty old version, so I'll use another static site generator and handle that myself. It remove all that mystery part from the equation.