Fairy Fox

Docs Build and deployment

Build and deployment

How the site builds and deploys itself through GitHub Actions, with no manual publish step.

The site builds and deploys itself. There is no manual publish step: every push to main produces a new live deploy.

The pipeline

On every push to main (and on a manual trigger), the workflow at .github/workflows/pages.yml runs:

  1. Checkout the repository.
  2. Set up Ruby (3.3) with bundler caching, installing the Gemfile gems.
  3. Configure Pages to provide the correct base path.
  4. Build with bundle exec jekyll build under JEKYLL_ENV=production.
  5. Upload the built _site/ as a Pages artifact.
  6. Deploy the artifact to the github-pages environment.

Building with the project’s own Bundler and Jekyll — rather than GitHub’s built-in Pages-gem build — means the site is not limited to GitHub’s plugin allowlist: any Jekyll version and any plugin listed in the Gemfile works.

Hosting and the custom domain

The site is served at fairyfox.io, the custom domain pointed at this repository’s GitHub Pages by the committed CNAME. Each project’s own Pages site is served under the same domain — for example, fairyfox.io/pokered-save-editor-2/ — so navigation can lead straight into a project’s documentation.

The repository is named 1fairyfox.github.io: it was created as a GitHub user site as junebug12851.github.io when the account carried that name, and after the account was renamed 1fairyfox the repository was renamed to match (2026-07-18), restoring the <username>.github.io user-site shape. Serving is unchanged — the domain is what everything is reached through — but the repo name now lines up with the account again, and the custom domain resolves every project under it.

One-time setup, for reference: the Pages source is set to “GitHub Actions” (not “deploy from a branch”); DNS points the apex domain at GitHub Pages; and HTTPS is enforced once the certificate issues.

Verifying a deploy

A failed build publishes nothing — the previous deploy stays live — so problems are fixed forward and pushed again. Deploys can be watched with the GitHub CLI (gh run watch).

Local preview

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve   # http://127.0.0.1:4000

For a production-equivalent build, JEKYLL_ENV=production bundle exec jekyll build.