GitHub Pages deployment fails at deploy-pages@v5 — "Deployment failed, try again later"

[hikarimusic]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

ARC (Actions Runner Controller)

Discussion Details

Title: GitHub Pages deployment fails at deploy-pages@v5 — "Deployment failed, try again later"

Artifact upload and deployment creation succeed, but the final step consistently fails:

Created deployment for <sha>, ID: <sha>
Getting Pages deployment status...
Error: Deployment failed, try again later.

• Repository: public, using MkDocs + peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v4
• Pages source: GitHub Actions
• Retried 4+ times over several hours — same result every time
• No changes to workflow config between working (previously) and failing
• GitHub Status page shows Pages as operational

Is this a known issue, or is there something else I should check?

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[Saakhavat-Prime]

Since the artifact upload and deployment creation both succeed, the workflow itself appears to be working. The failure is happening during the final GitHub Pages deployment step, which suggests the issue is either with the Pages deployment service or the repository's Pages configuration.

Here are a few things I'd check:

1. Verify Settings → Pages and make sure the source is set to GitHub Actions.

2. Ensure your workflow has the required permissions:

   permissions:
     contents: read
     pages: write
     id-token: write

3. If you're using deploy-pages@v5, make sure you're not mixing deployment methods. Use either:

   • actions/upload-pages-artifact + actions/deploy-pages, or
   • peaceiris/actions-gh-pages

   Mixing both can sometimes cause deployment issues.

4. Check the Pages deployment details (not just the Actions logs) to see if there are any additional error messages.

5. If nothing has changed and this previously worked, try cancelling any pending/failed deployments and trigger a fresh workflow run.

If all of the above looks correct and you're still getting:

Error: Deployment failed, try again later.

despite multiple retries over several hours, it may be worth opening a GitHub Support ticket with the workflow run URL, deployment ID, and repository details so they can investigate the backend deployment failure.

As an alternative: if you need your site online immediately, you could temporarily deploy it to Vercel or Netlify while investigating the GitHub Pages issue. They both work well with static sites like MkDocs. However, I'd still recommend identifying the root cause of the GitHub Pages deployment failure rather than switching platforms solely because of this error.

[strzalj]

I have the same issue. Since yesterday github pages deployment process is failing:

[strzalj]

Hmmm after changing source to GitHub Actions it went through.

[hikarimusic]

@strzalj thank you very much! I switch the source to "GitHub Actions", then switch back to "Deploy from a branch", then new deployment succeeded!

[dkfellows]

For me, changing from "Github Actions" to "Deploy from a branch" and then back to "Github Actions" made it work.

I'm guessing someone altered the encoding of those settings somewhere (or where they needed to be stored) in response to yesterday's incident. Which is rather worrying when it comes to Github's handling of continuity of software model and sources of truth.

[4piu]

For me, changing from "Github Actions" to "Deploy from a branch" and then back to "Github Actions" made it work.

This also fixed the issue for me

[nerdigwalking]

Hi, same issue here. Where do I switch this?

[keywords-app]

Deploy from a branch still failing this morning, but switching to Actions worked.

[nerdigwalking]

Hi, same issue here. Where do I switch this?

[nerdigwalking]

Ah found it: Go to Settings → Pages
Choose Deploy from a branch → main → root
Wait a few minutes — your site should be live

[divyamamgai]

The suggested fix does not work at all. Why is this broken? I cannot use GitHub Actions. I have to use the branch and a different directory than root. And no amount of switching between them is doing anything.

Also why does the status page not show a downtime for this?

[danielvartan]

It is happening to me too, since yesterday.

[Rmano]

Just a me too here --- not solved by the various workarounds. It seems that deploying to pages is generally broken (either by Actions or branch)

[HEYimHeroic]

still happening for me, using "deploy from a branch". super annoying when every other deployment fails and there's absolutely 0 indication of this on the status page

[ftnext]

I’d like to share my recovery example for the “Deploy from a branch” case.

In my repository, GitHub Pages was configured as:

• Source: Deploy from a branch
• Branch: gh-pages
• Path: /
• build_type: legacy

A custom workflow that publishes files to the gh-pages branch was still succeeding, but the GitHub-created pages-build-deployment workflow started failing at actions/deploy-pages@v5:

Fetching artifact metadata for "github-pages" in this workflow run
Found 1 artifact(s)
Creating Pages deployment with payload:
...
Created deployment for <sha>, ID: <sha>
Getting Pages deployment status...
Error: Deployment failed, try again later.

The first failure looked like a timeout after about 10 minutes. After that, retries failed much faster, usually within 10-20 seconds.

What fixed it for me was re-applying the existing Pages branch settings via the REST API, then publishing a fresh commit to the configured Pages branch:

gh api -X PUT repos/OWNER/REPO/pages \
  -f build_type=legacy \
  -f 'source[branch]=gh-pages' \
  -f 'source[path]=/'

Then I re-ran my own publishing workflow, which force-pushed a new commit to gh-pages.

After that, the GitHub-created pages-build-deployment workflow succeeded again, and the latest Pages build changed from errored to built.

So for repositories that must keep using “Deploy from a branch”, it may be worth checking whether the saved Pages settings or referenced branch commit are stale or internally inconsistent. Re-applying the same Pages source settings, then pushing a fresh commit to the selected branch, recovered my repository.

I’m not sure about the root cause, but this looks related to the same class of issue where toggling the Pages source in Settings resets some internal Pages state.

full (Japanese): https://nikkie-ftnext.hatenablog.com/entry/github-actions-deploy-pages-error-deployment-failed-try-again-later-202607

[cmbernard333]

I tried other workarounds, but ultimately this one worked for me.

[brunomartins84]

Can confirm this one works — thanks for sharing it! 🙏

After 3 days of failures (branch-based Pages, custom domain), retries and the
Settings → Pages source toggle did nothing. What fixed it was the API reset from
that post, and in my case the key step was forcing a fresh build afterwards:

gh api -X PUT repos/OWNER/REPO/pages \
  -f build_type=legacy \
  -f 'source[branch]=gh-pages' \
  -f 'source[path]=/'

gh api -X POST repos/OWNER/REPO/pages/builds   # ← this made it pick up the actual HEAD

If you want to check you're hitting the same issue before trying:
gh api repos/OWNER/REPO/pages shows "status": "errored" and
.../pages/builds/latest is stuck "building" on a commit that's no longer your
branch HEAD.
First deployment after the POST came back green and it's been fine since.

[Map9876]

same problems,

Build and deployment

Source

Deploy from a branch

Branch

Your GitHub Pages site is currently being built from the gh-pages branch. Learn more about configuring the publishing source for your site.

gh-pages/ (root)

[Rmano]

This should be unmarked as "solved". Pages are busted right now...

[arongida]

I am having the same issue. Manually retrying a few times usually solves it but very annoying.

[raphink]

Deployments failing randomly (most of the time) in the last 3 days at least.

[DevTarlow]

Same issues here, Deployments failing randomly, while some make it through. Sometimes when i rerun all jobs it goes through.