Hi everyone. Lately I've been wanting to publish a public static website that's in a private repository of mine (hosted on gitlab.com). I already did that in the past once and supposed that it wouldn't be a problem for me.

However, now, GitLab keeps telling me "Access Control is enabled for this Pages website; only authorized users will be able to access it. To make your website publicly available, navigate to your project's Settings > General > Visibility and select Everyone in pages section", and when I do these exact steps, nothing changes and the message keeps showing up for some reason. I tried waiting a few hours and fiddling with the visibility fields but nothing works.

When I checked on my older project to compare fields, I noticed that the pages' visibility was "Only Project Members" though it was still accessible on other computers and on a private window without logging in, but I once miss-clicked on "Save" and now the message above keeps popping up on this repository too, and, of course, the previously-public pages are now private, even though I checked "Everyone" on "Pages Visibility" there.

The documentation also shares this YouTube video and I noticed the subcategories on Visibility was "Pages access control" here while it is "Pages" on my computer. I wonder if the name change broke something but I can't tell much about it. I tried to check on the issues list and haven't seen anyone talk about that.

Is there anything I can do to make my pages public?

Thanks a lot.

Greetings,

keep in mind that I come from github, where creating a github pages static website consists of just placing html files in a repository with the correct name.

I followed the guide to create a gitlab pages website. I created its script thing. Then it said it had no "runner" for the pipeline/job.

Then I created that runner, I installed gitlab-runner.exe as explained, copied the stuff it told me to copy in the command line, called gitlab-runner.exe run. The job started, and it failed. In the terminal that is running gitlab-runner I got this error:

ERROR: Job failed (system failure): prepare environment: failed to start process: exec: "pwsh": executable file not found in %PATH%. Check https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/shells/index.html#shell-profile-loading for more information  duration_s=0.0085868 job=52 project=113 runner=uuj-sLTL2

I couldn't find a single gitlab guide that said anything specific about what else I need to do to setup this convoluted mess. The runners documentation doesn't mention pages deployment, the pages documentation doesn't mention runners at all.

What am I supposed to do? Where can I read about the setup steps that I'm evidently missing?

I'm also wondering, does the runner only take care of some behind-the-scenes process to build the website, and it'll be hosted in the gitlab server, or is the website going to be dependent on having the runner.exe process constantly active?

Sorry for the ranty tone, I just didn't expect this to eat up half a day.

Edit: it's likely relevant, we're not using the public gitlab website, we're using a self-hosted version within the company.

Edit edit: I fixed the issue, the runner now runs and the job completes. However i cannot access the pages page.Deploy doesn't contain any "pages" tab, only Releases, Feature flags, Package Registry. If I search "pages" in Settings/General I see an info box

GitLab Pages has moved

To go to GitLab Pages, on the left sidebar, select Deploy > Pages. ù

But the link it redirects to is a 404.

This is my .gitlab-ci.yml file:

image: alpine:latest

pages:
  stage: deploy
  script:
  - echo 'Nothing to do...'
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public
  only:
  - master

And the public directory contains a hierarchy of html files and subdirectories. The master branch is master, no main/master issue either.