To Gitlab Pages from AWS CloudFormation and Travis CI

Last year, I had some fun building a Github Page alternative with AWS CloudFormation and Travis CI. In retrospect, there was some clear indication of over-engineering.

And with the expiry of my Github Education subscription, a new home is needed for my private repos. With built-in free CI/CD and unlimited private repos, Gitlab is a godsend. And not forgetting Gitlab Pages for hosting static sites!

Entering the Gitlab-land

At the core of the configuration is the .gitlab-ci.yml file.

# requiring the environment of Ruby 2.3.x
image: ruby:2.3

# add bundle cache to 'vendor' for speeding up builds
cache:
  paths: 
    - vendor/

before_script:
  - bundle install --path vendor

# the 'pages' job will deploy and build your site to the 'public' path
pages:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - bundle exec jekyll build -d public/
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  only:
    - master # this job will affect only the 'master' branch

# To solve encoding error:
variables:
  LC_ALL: "C.UTF-8"
  LANG: "en_US.UTF-8"
  LANGUAGE: "en_US.UTF-8"

And the CI build log is such a delight to watch :)

Some errors and solutions

Gitlab CI: Conversion error: Jekyll::Converters::Scss encountered an error while converting 'assets/css/style.scss': Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2" on line 5

Solution: Change encoding to UTF-8.

Reference

Gitlab CI: Filed to extract & 404 HTTP error at the domain name

Solution: The folder must be named public instead of _site etc.

Reference

Browser: Multiple 404 erros returned by .css files

Solution: username.gitlab.io/css/monokai.css is invalid due to the missing repo name in the path.

• Option 1 (Chosen): add an domain name
• Option 2: change baseurl to in include the full path username.gitlab.io/[reponame]/css/monokai.css at _config.yml

Reference

/Chris