skip to content
Posts · September 2026

A Brief Note on Migrating My Blog

By Gohan_taberu·September 9, 2026 ·4 min read

blog· debugging· rant

Yesterday, for some reason, I suddenly decided to migrate my blog from a private server on Rainyun to GitHub.
And once I had decided to do it, I figured, since I’m migrating the site anyway, changing the whole look is perfectly reasonable, right

So I chose Astro Kami as the foundation of my new blog (and I’d also like to thank the author for making such a damn nice template).

However, Astro Kami handles multilingual content with English as the default language.

src/post/.md          → English
src/post/zh/.md       → Chinese

So I changed some of the code and reorganized the file structure, then adjusted the routes accordingly.

export const defaultLocale: Locale = "zh";
...


export function normalizeLocale(value?: string): Locale {
    const normalized = value?.toLowerCase();


    if (normalized === "en") return "en";


    return defaultLocale;
}

Then came the migration of my two blog posts. I translated them into English, added them under /en/, pushed everything to the repository, and called it a day!!!

Was I really done?

My website is:

https://omori-gohan.github.io/Gohan-s-blog/

But my static assets were being served from:

https://omori-gohan.github.io/_astro

I checked the code and found this:

BASE_PATH: ${{ steps.pages.outputs.base_path }}

So the correct approach should be to let GitHub Pages provide base_path and pass it directly to Astro.

Thus:

pnpm build --site "${{ steps.pages.outputs.origin }}" --base "${{ steps.pages.outputs.base_path }}"

Some genius accidentally typed an extra -- at first, which caused --site and --base not to be passed to Astro as intended. I won’t say who…

You thought that was the end? Nope. The real suffering had only just begun.

After visiting the deployed site, I found another problem. The article content had been updated, but for some reason, the default language was still English. Switching the language with Lang would turn it into Chinese.

So I went back to my local project and checked:

<HomePage locale="zh" />

Yep, correct.

Then:

<html lang="zh-CN">

Yep, correct.

Now that’s weird.

The local build was correct, so let’s check what was happening on the server.

I added a little CI debug:

- name: Debug i18n config
  run: |
    echo "=== index.astro ==="
    cat src/pages/index.astro
    echo "=== i18n config ==="
    sed -n '1,130p' src/i18n/config.ts
    echo "=== git commit ==="
    git rev-parse HEAD

And let me complain about this stupidly strict indentation for a moment.
My CI broke at this point because I got the indentation wrong the first time.

Then I checked the logs and found:

<HomePage locale="en" />

English.

That’s not right.

The local build was fine, but after pushing to the remote it somehow became en.

And git status had literally told me everything was clean.

Why did this happen?

Remember what my local Astro file showed?

<AboutPage locale="zh" />

However:

git show :src/pages/about.astro

showed:

<AboutPage locale="en" />

Bro, what the hell????????

Then:

git hash-object src/pages/about.astro
git rev-parse HEAD:src/pages/about.astro

showed that the Hash of the file in my Working Tree was different from the Hash in HEAD.

So I forcibly made Git rebuild the index from the files on disk:

git update-index --force-remove ...
git add ...

Then I used git diff --cached to check the changes:

<AboutPage locale="en" />
<AboutPage locale="zh" />


<ShowcasePage locale="en" />
<ShowcasePage locale="zh" />


getPostsForLocale("en")
getPostsForLocale("zh")

Finally. FINALLY.

We figured it out: Git’s Index was not reflecting the changes that had already happened in the Working Tree.

And everything finally made sense:

This time, I actually ran into two completely independent problems:


① Git / locale problem
────────────────────────────────────────


Local Working Tree
about.astro        → zh
showcase.astro     → zh
posts/[...page]    → zh
        │
        │ But the Git Index did not correctly reflect these changes
        ▼
Git Index
about.astro        → en
showcase.astro     → en
posts/[...page]    → en
        │
        │ git commit / git push
        ▼
GitHub main
about.astro        → en
showcase.astro     → en
posts/[...page]    → en
        │
        │ GitHub Actions checkout
        ▼
Astro Build
        │
        └──────────→ Default pages were built in English
                         │
                         ▼
                    GitHub Pages
                         │
                         └──→ Home / Posts / Showcase / About
                              were partially displayed in English




② GitHub Pages / base path problem
────────────────────────────────────────


GitHub Pages
Actual URL:
https://omori-gohan.github.io/Gohan-s-blog/
        │
        │
        ▼
Astro initially generated assets as:
/_astro/...
/rss.xml
/posts/...
        │
        │ They should actually live under /Gohan-s-blog/
        ▼
CSS / JS request paths were wrong
        │
        ▼
Assets failed to load
        │
        ▼
The page was left as bare HTML / plain text

Looking through the logs, I also noticed that the files had differences related to BOM / encoding. Although I can’t say for certain that this was the only cause of the Index problem, I decided to add a .gitattributes file anyway, just to standardize how text files are handled and hopefully avoid more Windows line-ending nonsense in the future.

* text=auto
*.astro text eol=lf
*.ts text eol=lf
*.js text eol=lf
*.json text eol=lf
*.md text eol=lf
*.mdx text eol=lf
*.yml text eol=lf
*.yaml text eol=lf

Finally, finally, finally. A bilingual Astro static blog had made it through a painful CI/CD debugging session and was officially complete!!!