Jekyll Post Not Reflecting On Gitlab Pages [solved]
The short story of a cute little problem between Jekyll, Gitlab Pages, and me
It was late past midnight when I finished writing yesterday’s post on independence day. I wanted to share the article on my social channels fast and get it done with.
So I commit and push. The slack integration immediately tells me that the commit has been pushed and I get a notification for successful completion of pipeline in about a minute.
The problem: I go to the live site and I can’t see the new post!
I check, double check
- On my local machine when I run
jekyll servethe post shows up first on the list. - The commit has indeed gone to the right repository and is reflected on Gitlab.
- Gitlab, though was having problems earlier that day with missing repositories wasn’t mentioning anything about pages having any problem. Also, the push to my other website that I did half an hour previously worked fine.
Then it suddenly struck me.
Solution
This is a time zone problem!
To be true to time, I had put the post date as 2017-08-16 in the file name. It was past midnight of 15th night and I was on August 16th IST. I also do not include post time in front matter because I rarely post more than one post per day.
Jekyll, by default, doesn’t output posts with a future date.
Now, when I generate the site on my computer, since I’m on IST, the post compiles and shows up in the site.
But when I commit and Gitlab CI builds the site, probably somewhere in Europe, the clock is still in August 15 and therefore the post I wrote in August 16 is in the future.
So I changed the date of my post to August 15 and voila, it was instantaneously published.
Footnotes
My sincere apologies for getting angry at Gitlab for a second and thinking of even going back to Github pages before realizing what the acutal problem was.