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Create a Pages website from a forked sample

GitLab provides sample projects for the most popular Static Site Generators (SSG). You can fork one of the sample projects and run the CI/CD pipeline to generate a Pages website.

Fork a sample project when you want to test GitLab Pages or start a new project that's already configured to generate a Pages site.

Watch a video tutorial of how this works.

To fork a sample project and create a Pages website:

  1. View the sample projects by navigating to the GitLab Pages examples group.
  2. Click the name of the project you want to fork.
  3. In the top right, click the Fork button, and then choose a namespace to fork to.
  4. Go to your project's CI/CD > Pipelines and click Run pipeline. GitLab CI/CD builds and deploys your site.

The site can take approximately 30 minutes to deploy. When the pipeline is finished, go to Settings > Pages to find the link to your website from your project.

For every change pushed to your repository, GitLab CI/CD runs a new pipeline that immediately publishes your changes to the Pages site.

You can take some optional further steps:

  • Remove the fork relationship. If you want to contribute to the project you forked from, you can keep this relationship. Otherwise, go to your project's Settings > General, expand Advanced settings, and scroll down to Remove fork relationship:

    Remove fork relationship

  • Change the URL to match your namespace. If your Pages site is hosted on GitLab.com, you can rename it to <namespace>.gitlab.io, where <namespace> is your GitLab namespace (the one you chose when you forked the project).

    • Go to your project's Settings > General and expand Advanced. Scroll down to Change path and change the path to <namespace>.gitlab.io.

      For example, if your project's URL is gitlab.com/gitlab-tests/jekyll, your namespace is gitlab-tests.

      If you set the repository path to gitlab-tests.gitlab.io, the resulting URL for your Pages website is https://gitlab-tests.gitlab.io.

      Change repository's path

    • Now go to your SSG's configuration file and change the base URL from "project-name" to "". The project name setting varies by SSG and may not be in the configuration file.