Why isn't my site public / accessible to others?

[shanjon]

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I have deployed a MKDocs site using GitHub Pages and am able to view the website using the link provided under Settings > Pages > Your site is live at [URL]

Beneath the link, I see the following warning message:

Caution: This repository is private but the published site will be public.

However, when I send this link to other people, it says "Unauthorized access error You are logged in as @USERNAME, which does not have access to this Page. Please contact an admin of the repository."

In case it matters, my repo is a fork of a private repo and therefore my repo is private as well. However, I only have GitHub Free (not GitHub Pro), so all of my GitHub Pages websites should be public by default. You need to have GitHub Pro in order to make GitHub Pages sites private.

I don't understand why my website is not public and am looking for insight into how I can make it publicly visible. Thank you.

[Gustavonn07]

Your MKDocs site using GitHub Pages is not being displayed publicly because you are using a private repository. While the GitHub Pages site is typically public by default, restricting access to the private repository overrides this setting.

To make your site publicly visible, you have a few options:

Make your repository public: If you are willing to make your repository public, you can change the repository's privacy settings to public. However, this means that anyone will be able to access and view your project's source code.

Moving your repository to an organization: If you're using a personal GitHub account, you might want to consider creating an organization and moving your repository into that organization. Organizations have the ability to create GitHub Pages sites from private repositories. This way, you can keep your project's code private and still have a public website.

Using an external hosting service: If you prefer to keep your repository private and don't want to make it public, you can consider hosting your MKDocs site on an external hosting service. There are several options available such as Netlify, Vercel, AWS Amplify, among others. These services allow you to deploy static websites from private repositories.

I hope it helps!

[shanjon]

Hi, Gustavo - thank you so much for quick and comprehensive response. I am a little confused as to why the repo being private makes a difference. GitHub's docs state that Pages sites are public even if the repo is private (see reference below). Did this change?

Warning: GitHub Pages sites are publicly available on the internet, even if the repository for the site is private. If you have sensitive data in your site's repository, you may want to remove the data before publishing. For more information, see "About repositories."

Source: https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#publishing-sources-for-github-pages-sites

[Gustavonn07]

Well it really is very confusing, because in this part I found that it kind of contradicts itself, but i think the private repository rule overrides this rule

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[yoannchaudet]

@shanjon It is kind of a bug.

You are forking a private repo in your user account. The account from which you forked is on the Enterprise account (so they have Private visibility supported for their sites). Only organizations can publish private visibility sites. You should actually not be allowed to publish the site at all from your account. We do that to enforce the private visibility of the repository on the parent (the fork). The bug here is that we published the site for you, but it is private and scoped to your username so no one else can access it.

I'll have the team look at that one. The site should not have been published in the first place and you should only see that in the Pages settings:

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