For over 2 years, I have been using the Beautiful Jekyll by Dean Attali as my github page. No doubt that it was simple and pleasant looking as a github page. However, I have always wanted to use my github page more than just a platform to post. I wanted to use it to promote myself as well as to build up my data science capability and portfolio.

I did a quick google search and found this fantastic github page template - al-folio. It is “a simple, clean, and responsive Jekyll theme for academics”. It is indeed those! I have to admit that I am not as proficient as I thought I was with git and github but hey, today I learned.

In my first few attempts, I had trouble running it despite following the instructions. I am not sure what was the mistakes or could it be that the instructions were slightly outdated? I wouldn’t say that it was one or the other but I managed to deploy the page after a few trials.

Anyway, the point of this post is simply to write down what I did in order to deploy it successfully. This will help me to recap what happened previously if ever I need to repeat the whole process again because of some errors.

To begin creating my own github page using al-folio tempalte, I first created a new repository by using this template on github. Thereafter, I gave it a temporary name e.g.test or simply name it as username.github.io as the repository name. Once that was done, I cloned the repo down to my local machine and went to the _config.yml file. In that file, I changed the url to username.github.io and left baseurl empty as per the instructions.

I then went back to repo on github then navigated to Settings > Action > General. I had to make sure that “Allow all actions and reusable workflows” was selected under the “Actions permissions”. In my previous attempts, I selected the “Allow username, and select non-username, actions and reusable workflow” (last option). This could be the reason why my page didn’t get deployed succesfully in my earlier attempts.

After that, I went to Settings > Pages and checked that the source is “Deploy from a branch” and the branch is “gh-pages”. All these changes need to be saved. Once the setting was done, I then pushed my changes to trigger the automatic workflow. The entire workflow typically took a few minutes to complete.

To check the status of the deployment, I went to the Actions tab and checked that the “pages build and deployment” action was completed and had a green tick on the left side. Or I could simply type in username.github.io into the internet browser and check for the changes I made.

Each push command would have 3 runs - “Docker Image CI”, “deploy” and “pages-build-deployment”. Once all three runs are successful then the github page would be successfully updated.

That is how I successfully created this whole github page. It is a rather simple process! It definitely took me a few hours over a day to figure out but hey, I learned something new. I am now 1 step closer to being proficient with git (wherever that place may be).

Cheers.