PROBLEM

When pushing JaCoCo web report to GitHub’s gh-pages branch, it does not render properly on the web. For example:-

The GitHub pages are powered by Jekyll. By default, Jekyll does not allow directories or files that begin with a dot, pound sign, tilde or underscore.

Since JaCoCo places all the image and CSS files in a directory called .resources, this directory will not be pushed to GitHub’s gh-pages branch.

SOLUTION UPDATE: 2015-07-23

GitHub Site Plugin has a noJekyll parameter that will create the .nojekyll file at the root path if it is set to true.

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.github.github</groupId>
    <artifactId>site-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${site-maven-plugin.version}</version>
    <configuration>
        <message>Creating site for ${project.version}</message>
        <server>github</server>
        <noJekyll>true</noJekyll>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <goals>
                <goal>site</goal>
            </goals>
            <phase>site</phase>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

SOLUTION 1: Disable Jekyll

One simple fix is to completely disable Jekyll by creating an empty file called .nojekyll at this location:-

myproject
├── pom.xml
├── src
│   ├── main
│   │   └── java
│   │       └── ...
│   ├── site
│   │   └── resources
│   │       └── .nojekyll

SOLUTION 2: Configure Jekyll

While disabling Jekyll works, it may 1) seem rather risky since there maybe other hidden directories/files and 2) possibly send too much garbage to GitHub’s gh-pages branch.

To fix this, we will instruct Jekyll to allow JaCoCo’s .resources directory through by creating a file called _config.yml at this location:-

myproject
├── pom.xml
├── src
│   ├── main
│   │   └── java
│   │       └── ...
│   ├── site
│   │   └── resources
│   │       └── _config.yml

In _config.yml, enter the following:-

# Allow JaCoCo's directory to bypass GitHub's Jekyll-powered pages 
# so that the web report renders properly
include: ['.resources']

OUTCOME

Either solution will produce a nicely rendered JaCoCo web report in GitHub pages.