Github pages and the confusing process for enforcing HTTPS

Many of you may know that for some time, now 13 years¹, GitHub has offered a service called Pages that allows you to host static sites, which is very convenient for hosting blogs and documentation.

That’s why it’s not news that this blog, like many others, is hosted right there. And the reason is not because it’s “cool” but much more concrete and venal.
One of the goals I set for myself was to not make it a living expense, so I chose the HUGO + GitHub Pages combo, a choice I would make again today! For once I can pat myself on the shoulder 🙂.

I later thought that in order to have a better SEO and more association between this blog and me, it would be good to have some custom domains.

Enforcing HTTPS.

I got the domains from ()register.it and I chose to use the DNS service from Cloudflare so after I configured the DNS records to support custom domains by having the apex and www point to the github.io subdomain.

At this point although the Pages section of the repo settings reset the flag on the correctness of the DNS records set the message immediately below informed me that the domain was not properly configured

Also the section Custom domain names that are unsupported confirmed the validity of the configuration and this caused me a big headache until I found this post from which I quote verbatim.

If you’re configuring an apex domain make sure there are no other A, AAAA, or ALIAS records listed on the apex.

If you’re configuring a subdomain, www or otherwise, make sure there are no other A, AAAA, or CNAME records on that same subdomain.

Somewhat discouraged, I removed the www record and despite the documentation and the appearance of this warning

(sorry but I forgot to capture the screen 🙏 so I retrieved it from an issue where I found out that other people had the same headache as me)