Jekyll/Github Pages -- index.html not being written?

Question

Cross-posted in a Github issue at https://github.com/SeanKilleen/seankilleen.github.io/issues/189

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Digging into an issue with GitHub pages that appears like it might be recent.

I noticed an up-tick in 404s via Google Analytics. It appears that posts with trailing slashes are becoming 404'd, but appeared just fine without the slash.

My local Jekyll instance generates the following structure for how-to-leave-a-company-well.md from Feb 2015:

/2015 /02 /how-to-leave-a-company-well.html /how-to-leave-a-company-well /index.html So, the following URLs work just fine locally:

• http://localhost:4000/2015/02/how-to-leave-a-company-well
• http://localhost:4000/2015/02/how-to-leave-a-company-well.html
• http://localhost:4000/2015/02/how-to-leave-a-company-well/index.html
• http://localhost:4000/2015/02/how-to-leave-a-company-well/

Those last two URLs that I've bolded do not seem to exist on my published site after GitHub Pages generates the documents.

I cannot reach http://seankilleen.com/2015/02/how-to-leave-a-company-well/ or http://seankilleen.com/2015/02/how-to-leave-a-company-well/index.html

This seems to indicate to me that GitHub Pages is doing something differently than my Jekyll installation. Given that the 404 spike is recent, I'm wondering if there might have been a change related to this.

Does anyone have a thought on how I might be able to diagnose this? It's a bit of a black box for me when my local is doing what I expect and I can't see the Github Pages process.

Answer 1

Jekyll 3 changed the way the permalinks worked, and dropped the trailing slash if your permalink setup did not contain one - yours does not contain a trailing slash at the end of your permalink in the config file. Jekyll 3 now respects that and thus your page is a 404 when there is a trailing slash in the url (since you want it without it).

https://jekyllrb.com/docs/upgrading/2-to-3/#permalinks-no-longer-automatically-add-a-trailing-slash

You may want to check which version of jekyll you have installed - you may be on 2.x and GH is now 3.x

When working locally, are you telling jekyll to use the GH pages gem? if you don't do this you may get different behavior on GH than local. I do not do this, so I can't tell you how to do it (or if this particular issue would happen), but I do know that you should do it if you want to preview locally what you will get when serving via GH.