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Limited Time

I’ve been a bit frustrated with the struggle to get my CI/CD pipeline working properly, not good for morale and momentum. Eventually, I’m going to write up a good concise how-to for what I’ve done so that others hopefully won’t end up with the same problems. And now… assumeforsimplicity.com keeps breaking. 404s on the home page that are throwing me off.

Looking Around

I’ve noticed that the GitHub Pages setting for Custom Domain isn’t sticking properly. I don’t think it was complaining or resetting before when my source folder was just set to the root of the main branch but I haven’t gone back to experiment yet. When I originally set it up, GitHub helped me create the CNAME file in the root of my repo and I see that file is being propagated to my gh-pages branch by my GitHub Action workflow Jekyll Action. So that seems right. But, when I keep adding back my domain in the custom domain setting I was seeing a little whirl around the GitHub icon next to the setting. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it before, but as I came to see that things were actually broken, it got my attention.

UPDATE: The CNAME file wasn’t being propagated. It was being created new every time I reset the Custom Domain setting.

Scroll Down and Wait

After a little more looking, and scrolling down and waiting, which I didn’t do before, I saw that GitHub was actually verifying, or trying to verify, my domain. Good…. But it was failing. After actually closely reading the message, it seemed to be saying I needed a CNAME record. That’s when I confirmed the stuff about the CNAME file above. Nope, it must not mean that. Well…. I went looking back at my domain registration on Google Domains. I knew there was a CNAME record there, but maybe. And, what I found was that was a CNAME that has to be for the internal lookup at Google. After some trial and error, I added another CNAME record for *.assumeforsimplicity.com to point back at jr101dallas.github.io. When I went back to the GitHub Pages settings again to set the Custom Domain value again, the DNS check finally came up as a green checkmark. Finally. Now, I think, I’m finally back in a momentum and good morale position. Thank goodness.

ALSO UPDATE: GitHub recommends AGAINST the wildcard record in your domain configuration. It will allow anyone on GitHub to put up their stuff at your domain, or something like that. I saw that I’d done something wrong and undid it. The real answer is here.

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