No Jekyll

I had a bit of a head-scratcher yesterday, as I was writing the Concepts post and found that my slickly auto-generated architecture diagrams were missing from my posts. Navigating to the image source URLs was giving me the big fat 404 on GitHub pages:

For sanity, I checked out the deploy branch, gh-pages, and sure enough my diagrams were present, nestled in a folder called _gen.

I was immediately suspicious about the leading underscore, and a quick search of “GitHub pages underscore” reminded me that GitHub processes deployments with Jekyll unless instructed not to. And what does Jekyll do? Removes files with a leading underscore. The smoking gun!

Straightforward stuff, I thought. I’ve been here before, just whack a .nojekyll file in the root of the pages branch. So I updated my CircleCI deploy job:

+ - run:
+     name: Disable jekyll processing
+     command: touch ./public/.nojekyll
  - run:
      name: Deploy to gh-pages branch
      command: gh-pages --dist ./public --message "[ci skip] Deploy updates"

But hold on. Still a 404? What in God’s name have I done to deserve this persecution? Is it there? I check out the branch, no, for crying out loud where’s it gone? Does touch not work on this damn docker image?

After losing some time to unhelpful stress¹ I eventually saw that now the blame probably lay with the subsequent gh-pages deploy step. Having a wee butchers at the tool’s options was telling:

Usage: gh-pages [options]

Options:
  -V, --version            output the version number
...
  -t, --dotfiles           Include dotfiles
...
  -h, --help               output usage information

…Well hello there --dotfiles you agent of chaos. I’ve got you now!

  - run:
      name: Deploy to gh-pages branch
-     command: gh-pages --dist ./public --message "[ci skip] Deploy updates"
+     command: gh-pages --dotfiles --dist ./public --message "[ci skip] Deploy updates"

Praise be. My nightmare ends.