Specifying a custom Jekyll site location in GitHub pages

If you move the root of your Jekyll project to a subdirectory of a Github Pages enabled repository, you will need to be sure to change the source and destination locations for the jekyll-build-pages action accordingly.

But, that’s not all. It is not obvious, but you also need to specify the path to the upload-pages-artifact action. Failure to do this will result in a GitHub Actions build fail for the “Uplodad artifact” stage, with the error message: “Error: Process completed with exit code 2” (see screenshot below).

Build fail screenshot

The reason this configuration requirement is not obvious is because the path parameter is not defined in the auto-generated Action config that GitHub gives you for Jekyll pages, but instead utilizes the default value of ./_site. To specify the path, use the with > path syntax.

For example, I have moved my Jekyll root to a location called site. Thus, the jobs section of my .github/workflows/pages.yml looks like this, (with special attention paid to the jekyll-build-pages, and the upload-pages-artifact actions):

jobs:
  # Build job
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Setup Pages
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v2
      - name: Build with Jekyll
        uses: actions/jekyll-build-pages@v1
        with:
          source: ./site/
          destination: ./site/_site
      - name: Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v1
        with:
          path: ./site/_site