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Descriptive error messages for failed GitHub Pages builds

It’s tough to be the bearer of bad news. Fortunately, today we’re making it a bit easier to quickly publish beautiful pages for you and your projects. When you push…

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It’s tough to be the bearer of bad news. Fortunately, today we’re making it a bit easier to quickly publish beautiful pages for you and your projects.

When you push a change to your GitHub Pages site — whether via Git command line, one of the desktop apps, or GitHub.com — we email you if for any reason we can’t build your site.

Starting today, you’ll also get a descriptive, human-readable error message for any failed build so that you can more easily troubleshoot what went wrong:

example failed build email

We’ve started by supporting the most common error messages seen on GitHub Pages, and will continue to roll out support for additional errors in the coming weeks.

For more information on troubled builds, see the Jekyll troubleshooting guide or contact GitHub Support. Happy publishing!

Written by

Ben Balter

Ben Balter

@benbalter

Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development.

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