I've found myself leaning on github pages more and more for static sites. Because I've this I've built this template repo as a staring point for static sites using Gulp and Github Pages. In theory you shouldn't need to mess with any of the Gulp setting but instead just add files to their correct directories and modify the config file and the build the site.
Start by clicking "Use this template" and check the "Include all branches" box and create this repo into your own account. This will then give you a place to customize your site.
Make sure you check "Include all branches" or you will have to manually create the gh-pages branch yourself
So, you didn't create the template with the "Include all branches" checkbox. You can create a gh-pages branch and push manually one time. I recommend that you create an empty branch for gh-pages and then push that with a simple "hello world" HTML page. By doing this you will signify to the backend processes at GitHub that you plan on using gh-pages and that they should build your site. If you don't, you'll have to spend a bunch of wasted time reaching out to support to get them to enable it. Learn from my mistake. Push something, anything, to the gh-pages branch manually at least once.
By default the only thing you need to change in the config/default.json file is going to be the site.url key. This is used when generating the sitemap.xml. If you do not want to automatically generate a sitemap.xml you can set site.sitemap to false and it won't be generated.
Now you're ready to build your actual site. Just put your content and it's structure under the html/pages directory. The HTML files in there use Nunjucks for templating and the Gulp scripts support both the html and nunjucks file extensions. You can modify / add more templates in the templates directory and your pages or other templates can utilize them.
I'd recommend using the sass directory for your styles. This also allows you to install things via NPM and include them into your SASS files. You can see in the Bulma example how to install it with NPM and then simply add your @import line to include it.
However if you want to just do CSS then it can go into the css directory and they will be copied over wholesale.
Place your javascript files in the js directory. Because it's using Browserify you can use NPM and require to include requirements.
All png, jpg, gif and svg files placed in the img directory will be copied over in the same structure that they exist.
Sometimes you need CSS or Javascript that comes from somewhere else or does not include SASS hooks. These can be either put directly in the js or css directories or can be installed via something like NPM or Yarn and then the paths to the Javascript or CSS files added to the static_files.js or static_files.css array. These paths are relative to the root of the repository.
The easiest way to test this is to run npm run watch. This will run a live-refreshing server on port 9000 that you can develop your site with. You can change the bind address, port and if you want it to live-refresh by changing the server settings in config/default.json
Start by creating a personal access token and then add that to your secrets as ACCESS_TOKEN. Once that has been done then you can git mv .github/disabled-workflows/build.yml .github/workflows/build.yml and push you changes. This should run the lint and build process and shortly your site should be available on the domain.