Deployment Guide

The ITGPG website leverages GitHub Pages for continuous deployment. There are no manual server uploads, FTP clients, or build scripts you need to run on your own machine.

How it Works

1. Commit & Push: Whenever a developer or maintainer pushes changes to the main branch on GitHub, a deployment is triggered.
2. GitHub Actions: GitHub spins up a secure runner, checks out the codebase, and executes a Jekyll build.
3. Static Generation: Jekyll compiles all Markdown files, injects _data configurations, and generates the final static HTML/CSS/JS files into a hidden _site/ directory.
4. Publishing: The runner takes the contents of _site/ and serves it securely over HTTPS at https://itgpg.github.io/.

Verifying Deployments

If you push a change and it doesn’t appear on the live site:

1. Navigate to the Actions tab in the GitHub repository.
2. Look for the most recent workflow run (usually named pages-build-deployment).
3. A Green Checkmark means the build was successful. (If you still don’t see changes, perform a hard refresh Ctrl+Shift+R to clear browser cache).
4. A Red X means the build failed.

Debugging Build Failures

If the deployment action fails, click on the failed run to view the logs. Common reasons include:

• YAML Syntax Errors: You forgot a space, quote, or bracket in _data/site_config.yml or a markdown file’s front-matter.
• Liquid Tag Errors: A broken {% include %} tag or missing variable reference.

Fix the syntax error on your local machine, test via bundle exec jekyll serve, and push the fix to trigger a new deployment.

Manual Deployments (Rare)

There are no hidden deployment steps or external CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Vercel, Netlify). If you ever need to manually force a rebuild without making a code change:

1. Go to the Actions tab.
2. Select the pages-build-deployment workflow on the left.
3. Click the Run workflow button on the right.