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README.md

GitLab Pages

Note: This feature was introduced in GitLab EE 8.3

With GitLab Pages you can host for free your static websites on GitLab. Combined with the power of GitLab CI and the help of GitLab Runner you can deploy static pages for your individual projects your user or your group.

Enable the pages feature in your GitLab EE instance

The administrator guide is located at administration.

Understanding how GitLab Pages work

GitLab Pages rely heavily on GitLab CI and its ability to upload artifacts. The steps that are performed from the initialization of a project to the creation of the static content, can be summed up to:

Create project (its name could be specific according to the case)
Enable the GitLab Pages feature under the project's settings
Provide a specific job in .gitlab-ci.yml
GitLab Runner builds the project
GitLab CI uploads the artifacts
Nginx serves the content

As a user, you should normally be concerned only with the first three items.

In general there are four kinds of pages one might create. This is better explained with an example so let's make some assumptions.

The domain under which the pages are hosted is named gitlab.io. There is a user with the username walter and they are the owner of an organization named therug. The personal project of walter is named area51 and don't forget that the organization has also a project under its namespace, called welovecats.

The following table depicts what the project's name should be and under which URL it will be accessible.

Pages type	Repository name	URL schema
User page	`walter/walter.gitlab.io`	`https://walter.gitlab.io`
Group page	`therug/therug.gitlab.io`	`https://therug.gitlab.io`
Specific project under a user's page	`walter/area51`	`https://walter.gitlab.io/area51`
Specific project under a group's page	`therug/welovecats`	`https://therug.gitlab.io/welovecats`

Enable the pages feature in your project

The GitLab Pages feature needs to be explicitly enabled for each project under its Settings.

Remove the contents of your pages

Pages can be explicitly removed from a project by clicking Remove Pages in a project's Settings.

Explore the contents of .gitlab-ci.yml

Before reading this section, make sure you familiarize yourself with GitLab CI and the specific syntax of.gitlab-ci.yml by following our quick start guide.

To make use of GitLab Pages, your .gitlab-ci.yml must follow the rules below:

A special pages job must be defined
Any static content must be placed under a public/ directory
artifacts with a path to the public/ directory must be defined

The pages are created after the build completes successfully and the artifacts for the pages job are uploaded to GitLab.

The example below is using Jekyll and assumes that the created HTML files are generated under the public/ directory.

image: ruby:2.1

pages:
  script:
  - gem install jekyll
  - jekyll build -d public/
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public

Example projects

Below is a list of example projects that make use of static generators. Contributions are very welcome.

Jekyll

Custom error codes pages

You can provide your own 403 and 404 error pages by creating the 403.html and 404.html files respectively in the public/ directory that will be included in the artifacts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Where are my generated pages stored?

A: All content is located by default under shared/pages/ in the root directory of the GitLab installation. To be exact, all specific projects under a namespace are stored in shared/pages/${namespace}/${project}/public/ and all user/group pages in shared/pages/${namespace}/${namespace}/public/.

Q: Can I download my generated pages?

A: Sure. All you need is to download the artifacts archive from the build page.