If your GitHub Pages repository contains a file that is not properly UTF-8 encoded, your GitHub Pages site will not build.

If your GitHub Pages site fails to build because of encoding errors, you'll get an email that looks like this:

Subject: Page build failed

The page build failed with the following error:

The file `example.html` was not properly UTF-8 encoded.

You will only receive an email if outbound email support is enabled on your Enterprise instance. For more information, contact your site administrator.

Troubleshooting UTF-8 encoding errors

Tip: We strongly recommend running Jekyll locally so you can easily debug and fix build errors before pushing to your GitHub Enterprise instance. To learn more about troubleshooting options, see "Troubleshooting GitHub Pages builds."

Computers expect text to appear as Latin characters. Encoding errors occur when you use non-Latin characters, like 日本語, without telling the computer to expect these symbols.

To force UTF-8 encoding, add the following line to your _config.yml file: encoding: UTF-8

After you make this change, you will need to commit your changes and push to your Pages repository on your GitHub Enterprise instance to trigger another build on the server.

For more help with Jekyll configuration, see the Jekyll documentation.