Select Topic Area

Question

Body

Our organization maintains extensive technical documentation across multiple products, and we're leveraging GitHub Pages combined with GitHub Actions for automated deployments. We're looking for best practices and optimization strategies for our documentation infrastructure.

Current setup:

• Multiple documentation sites (10+ repositories) using static site generators (Jekyll, Docusaurus, MkDocs)
• GitHub Actions workflows for build and deployment
• Using both project pages (repository-specific) and organization pages
• Documentation versioning for different product releases
• Need to support staging/preview environments alongside production

Challenges and questions:

1. Preview deployments: We want to automatically deploy PR-based previews of documentation changes before merging to main. What's the best approach for this with GitHub Pages? Should we use:

   • Multiple branches (gh-pages, gh-pages-preview)?
   • Separate repositories for preview sites?
   • Third-party preview deployment services?
   • GitHub Actions with custom subdomain routing?

2. Build optimization: Some of our documentation sites take 10-15 minutes to build (large API reference docs, many pages). How can we:

   • Implement incremental builds to speed up deployments?
   • Cache dependencies and build artifacts effectively in GitHub Actions?
   • Parallelize builds across multiple documentation sections?

3. Custom domain management: We have custom domains configured for organization Pages. When deploying multiple documentation sites under subpaths, what's the recommended DNS and CNAME configuration? How do you handle SSL certificate provisioning for custom domains?

4. Deployment strategies: Currently using the standard GitHub Pages deployment action. Are there advantages to:

   • Using actions/deploy-pages vs. direct branch deployment?
   • Deploying to the gh-pages branch vs. using GitHub Actions artifacts?
   • Implementing blue-green deployments for zero-downtime updates?

5. Version management: We need to maintain documentation for multiple product versions (v1.x, v2.x, v3.x). What's the best structure:

   • Multiple subdirectories in the same site?
   • Version-specific branches?
   • Separate GitHub Pages sites per version?

6. Build status and rollback: How do you:

   • Ensure visibility into deployment status across multiple documentation sites?
   • Implement quick rollback mechanisms if a deployment breaks the site?
   • Test links and validate documentation before going live?

7. Performance and CDN: GitHub Pages uses a CDN, but are there additional optimizations worth implementing:

   • Asset optimization (image compression, minification)?
   • Cache headers configuration?
   • Client-side search vs. server-side search for documentation?

Questions:

• What GitHub Actions workflows have you found most effective for Pages deployments?
• How do you handle documentation branches and merging across multiple versions?
• Any recommendations for monitoring GitHub Pages uptime and performance?
• Best practices for organizing multi-repository documentation with a unified user experience?
• How do you handle authentication/access control for private documentation on Pages?

Would love to hear from teams running production documentation infrastructure on GitHub Pages!