- Getting started
- How it works
- Access to your Pages site
- Pages examples
- Administer GitLab Pages for self-managed instances
- Security for GitLab Pages
- Unique domains
- Expiring deployments
- Parallel deployments
- User-defined job names
GitLab Pages
With GitLab Pages, you can publish static websites directly from a repository in GitLab.
- Use for any personal or business website.
- Use any Static Site Generator (SSG) or plain HTML.
- Create websites for your projects, groups, or user account.
- Host your site on your own GitLab instance or on GitLab.com for free.
- Connect your custom domains and TLS certificates.
- Attribute any license to your content.
To publish a website with Pages, you can use any static site generator, like Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo, Middleman, Harp, Hexo, or Brunch. You can also publish any website written directly in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Pages does not support dynamic server-side processing, for instance, as .php
and .asp
requires.
For more information, see
Static vs dynamic websites.
Getting started
To create a GitLab Pages website:
Document | Description |
---|---|
Use the GitLab UI to create a simple .gitlab-ci.yml
| Add a Pages site to an existing project. Use the UI to set up a simple .gitlab-ci.yml .
|
Create a .gitlab-ci.yml file from scratch
| Add a Pages site to an existing project. Learn how to create and configure your own CI file. |
Use a .gitlab-ci.yml template
| Add a Pages site to an existing project. Use a pre-populated CI template file. |
Fork a sample project | Create a new project with Pages already configured by forking a sample project. |
Use a project template | Create a new project with Pages already configured by using a template. |
To update a GitLab Pages website:
Document | Description |
---|---|
GitLab Pages domain names, URLs, and base URLs | Learn about GitLab Pages default domains. |
Explore GitLab Pages | Requirements, technical aspects, specific GitLab CI/CD configuration options, Access Control, custom 404 pages, limitations, and FAQ. |
Custom domains and SSL/TLS Certificates | Custom domains and subdomains, DNS records, and SSL/TLS certificates. |
Let’s Encrypt integration | Secure your Pages sites with Let’s Encrypt certificates, which are automatically obtained and renewed by GitLab. |
Redirects | Set up HTTP redirects to forward one page to another. |
For more information, see:
Document | Description |
---|---|
Static vs dynamic websites | Static versus dynamic site overview. |
Modern static site generators | SSG overview. |
Build any SSG site with GitLab Pages | Use SSGs for GitLab Pages. |
How it works
To use GitLab Pages, you must create a project in GitLab to upload your website’s files to. These projects can be either public, internal, or private.
GitLab always deploys your website from a specific folder called public
in your
repository. When you create a new project in GitLab, a repository
becomes available automatically.
To deploy your site, GitLab uses its built-in tool called GitLab CI/CD
to build your site and publish it to the GitLab Pages server. The sequence of
scripts that GitLab CI/CD runs to accomplish this task is created from a file named
.gitlab-ci.yml
, which you can create and modify.
A specific job
called pages
in the configuration file makes GitLab aware that you’re deploying a
GitLab Pages website.
You can either use the GitLab default domain for GitLab Pages websites,
*.gitlab.io
, or your own domain (example.com
). In that case, you
must be an administrator in your domain’s registrar (or control panel) to set it up with Pages.
The following diagrams show the workflows you might follow to get started with Pages.
Access to your Pages site
If you’re using GitLab Pages default domain (.gitlab.io
), your website is
automatically secure and available under HTTPS. If you’re using your own custom
domain, you can optionally secure it with SSL/TLS certificates.
If you’re using GitLab.com, your website is publicly available to the internet. To restrict access to your website, enable GitLab Pages Access Control.
If you’re using a self-managed instance, your websites are published on your own server, according to the Pages settings chosen by your sysadmin, who can make them public or internal.
Pages examples
These GitLab Pages website examples can teach you advanced techniques to use and adapt for your own needs:
- Posting to your GitLab Pages blog from iOS.
- GitLab CI: Run jobs sequentially, in parallel, or build a custom pipeline.
- GitLab CI: Deployment & environments.
- Building a new GitLab docs site with Nanoc, GitLab CI, and GitLab Pages.
- Publish code coverage reports with GitLab Pages.
Administer GitLab Pages for self-managed instances
If you are running a self-managed instance of GitLab, follow the administration steps to configure Pages.
Watch a video tutorial about how to get started with GitLab Pages administration.
Configure GitLab Pages in a Helm Chart (Kubernetes) instance
To configure GitLab Pages on instances deployed with Helm chart (Kubernetes), use either:
Security for GitLab Pages
Namespaces that contain .
If your username is example
, your GitLab Pages website is located at example.gitlab.io
.
GitLab allows usernames to contain a .
, so a user named bar.example
could create
a GitLab Pages website bar.example.gitlab.io
that effectively is a subdomain of your
example.gitlab.io
website. Be careful if you use JavaScript to set cookies for your website.
The safe way to manually set cookies with JavaScript is to not specify the domain
at all:
// Safe: This cookie is only visible to example.gitlab.io
document.cookie = "key=value";
// Unsafe: This cookie is visible to example.gitlab.io and its subdomains,
// regardless of the presence of the leading dot.
document.cookie = "key=value;domain=.example.gitlab.io";
document.cookie = "key=value;domain=example.gitlab.io";
This issue doesn’t affect users with a custom domain, or users who don’t set any cookies manually with JavaScript.
Shared cookies
By default, every project in a group shares the same domain, for example, group.gitlab.io
. This means that cookies are also shared for all projects in a group.
To ensure each project uses different cookies, enable the Pages unique domains feature for your project.
Unique domains
-
Introduced in GitLab 15.9 with a flag named
pages_unique_domain
. Disabled by default. - Enabled by default in GitLab 15.11.
- Feature flag removed in GitLab 16.3.
- Changed unique domain URLs to be shorter in GitLab 17.4.
By default, every new project uses pages unique domain. This is to avoid projects on the same group to share cookies.
The project maintainer can disable this feature on:
- On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
- Select Deploy > Pages.
- Clear the Use unique domain checkbox.
- Select Save changes.
For example URLs, see GitLab Pages default domain names.
Expiring deployments
- Introduced in GitLab 17.4.
You can configure your Pages deployments to be automatically deleted after
a period of time has passed by specifying a duration at pages.expire_in
:
pages:
stage: deploy
script:
- ...
pages:
expire_in: 1 week
artifacts:
paths:
- public
By default, parallel deployments expire
automatically after 24 hours. To disable this behavior, set pages.expire_in
to never
.
Expired deployments are stopped by a cron job that runs every 10 minutes. Stopped deployments are subsequently deleted by another cron job that also runs every 10 minutes. To recover it, follow the steps described in Recover a stopped deployment.
A stopped or deleted deployment is no longer available on the web. Users will see a 404 Not found error page at its URL, until another deployment is created with the same URL configuration.
Recover a stopped deployment
Prerequisites:
- You must have at least the Maintainer role for the project.
To recover a stopped deployment that has not yet been deleted:
- On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
- Select Deploy > Pages.
- Near Deployments turn on the Include stopped deployments toggle. If your deployment has not been deleted yet, it should be included in the list.
- Expand the deployment you want to recover and select Restore.
Parallel deployments
-
Introduced in GitLab 16.7 as an experiment with a flag named
pages_multiple_versions_setting
, disabled by default. - Renamed from “multiple deployments” to “parallel deployments” in GitLab 17.4.
- Enabled on GitLab.com, self-managed, and GitLab Dedicated in GitLab 17.4.
Use the pages.path_prefix
CI/CD option to configure a prefix for the GitLab Pages URL.
A prefix allows you to differentiate between multiple GitLab Pages deployments:
- Main deployment: a Pages deployment created with a blank
path_prefix
. - Parallel deployment: a Pages deployment created with a non-blank
path_prefix
The value of pages.path_prefix
is:
- Converted to lowercase.
- Shortened to 63 bytes.
- Any character except numbers (
0-9
) and letter (a-z
) is replaced with a hyphen (-
). - Leading and trailing hyphens (
-
) are removed.
Example configuration
Consider a project such as https://gitlab.example.com/namespace/project
. By default, its main Pages deployment can be accessed through:
- When using a unique domain:
https://project-namespace-123456.gitlab.io/
. - When not using a unique domain:
https://namespace.gitlab.io/project
.
If a pages.path_prefix
is configured to the project branch names,
like path_prefix = $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH
, and there’s a
branch named username/testing_feature
, this parallel Pages deployment would be accessible through:
- When using a unique domain:
https://project-namespace-123456.gitlab.io/username-testing-feature
. - When not using a unique domain:
https://namespace.gitlab.io/project/username-testing-feature
.
Enable parallel deployments
To enable parallel GitLab Pages deployments:
- On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
- Select Deploy > Pages.
- Select Enable parallel deployments.
Limits
The number of parallel deployments is limited by the root-level namespace. For specific limits for:
- GitLab.com, see Other limits.
- Self-managed GitLab instances, see Number of parallel Pages deployments.
To immediately reduce the number of active deployments in your namespace, delete some deployments. For more information, see Delete a deployment.
To configure an expiry time to automatically delete older deployments, see Expiring deployments.
Expiration
By default, parallel deployments expire after 24 hours, after which they are deleted. If you’re using a self-hosted instance, your instance admin can configure a different default duration.
To customize the expiry time, configure pages.expire_in
.
To prevent deployments from automatically expiring, set pages.expire_in
to
never
.
Path clash
pages.path_prefix
can take dynamic values from CI/CD variables
that can create pages deployments which could clash with existing paths in your site.
For example, given an existing GitLab Pages site with the following paths:
/index.html
/documents/index.html
If a pages.path_prefix
is documents
, that version will override the existing path.
In other words, https://namespace.gitlab.io/project/documents/index.html
will point to the
/index.html
on the documents
deployment of the site, instead of documents/index.html
of the
main
deployment of the site.
Mixing CI/CD variables with other strings can reduce the path clash possibility. For example:
pages:
stage: deploy
script:
- echo "Pages accessible through ${CI_PAGES_URL}/${PAGES_PREFIX}"
variables:
PAGES_PREFIX: "" # No prefix by default (master)
pages:
path_prefix: "$PAGES_PREFIX"
artifacts:
paths:
- public
rules:
- if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH # Run on default branch (with default PAGES_PREFIX)
- if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "staging" # Run on master (with default PAGES_PREFIX)
variables:
PAGES_PREFIX: '_stg' # Prefix with _stg for the staging branch
- if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "merge_request_event" # Conditionally change the prefix for Merge Requests
when: manual # Run pages manually on Merge Requests
variables:
PAGES_PREFIX: 'mr-$CI_MERGE_REQUEST_IID' # Prefix with the mr-<iid>, like `mr-123`
Some other examples of mixing variables with strings for dynamic prefixes:
-
pages.path_prefix: 'mr-$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG'
: Branch or tag name prefixed withmr-
, likemr-branch-name
. -
pages.path_prefix: '_${CI_MERGE_REQUEST_IID}_'
: Merge request number prefixed ans suffixed with_
, like_123_
.
Use parallel deployments to create Pages environments
You can use parallel GitLab Pages deployments to create a new environment. For example:
pages:
stage: deploy
script:
- echo "Pages accessible through ${CI_PAGES_URL}/${PAGES_PREFIX}"
variables:
PAGES_PREFIX: "" # no prefix by default (master)
pages:
path_prefix: "$PAGES_PREFIX"
environment:
name: "Pages ${PAGES_PREFIX}"
url: "${CI_PAGES_URL}/${PAGES_PREFIX}"
artifacts:
paths:
- public
rules:
- if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "staging" # ensure to run on master (with default PAGES_PREFIX)
variables:
PAGES_PREFIX: '_stg' # prefix with _stg for the staging branch
- if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "merge_request_event" # conditionally change the prefix on Merge Requests
when: manual # run pages manually on Merge Requests
variables:
PAGES_PREFIX: 'mr-$CI_MERGE_REQUEST_IID' # prefix with the mr-<iid>, like `mr-123`
With this configuration, users will have the access to each GitLab Pages deployment through the UI. When using environments for pages, all pages environments are listed on the project environment list.
You can also group similar environments together.
Delete a Deployment
To delete a deployment:
- On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
- Select Deploy > Pages.
- Under Deployments, select any area on the deployment you wish to delete. The deployment details expand.
- Select Delete.
When you select Delete, your deployment is stopped immediately. Stopped deployments are deleted by a cron job running every 10 minutes.
To restore a stopped deployment that has not been deleted yet, see Recover a stopped deployment.
Auto-clean
Parallel Pages deployments, created by a merge request with a path_prefix
, are automatically deleted when the
merge request is closed or merged.
User-defined job names
-
Introduced in GitLab 17.5 with a flag
customizable_pages_job_name
, disabled by default. -
Generally available in GitLab 17.6. Feature flag
customizable_pages_job_name
removed.
To trigger a Pages deployment from any job, include the pages
property in the
job definition. It can either be a Boolean set to true
or a hash.
For example, using true
:
deploy-my-pages-site:
stage: deploy
script:
- npm run build
pages: true
artifacts:
paths:
- public
For example, using a hash:
deploy-pages-review-app:
stage: deploy
script:
- npm run build
pages:
path_prefix: '/_staging'
artifacts:
paths:
- public
If the pages
property of a job named pages
is set to false
, no
deployment is triggered:
pages:
pages: false