Existence of a index.md file in the contents repo

[Cmurilochem]

While building a content template repo to be deployed by NEBULA (https://github.com/esciencecenter-digital-skills/NEBULA-content-template) I realised that in order to be able to pass the deploy_with_NEBULA step in the CI/CD we need to have a index.md file in our contents repo.

This is actually the case for research-software-support. I was wondering, is there any reason for this ? I am asking because the file looks quite dummy with (a priori) few important info:

# Hello world

Here is some markdown content.

[Demo lesson link](/lessons/demo)

I suspect that there is something just requiring the file to be there.

[JaroCamphuijsen]

Hi @Cmurilochem I think indeed that we can get rid of this index.md file in theory. However as you say it is currently necessary to build. Thank your for opening this issue. I agree we should investigate how we can get rid of this file.

[JaroCamphuijsen]

For me the local rendering works without an index.md file in the root of the content repo. So it should not be necessary. @Cmurilochem did you check where the index.md file is required in the deploy_with_NEBULA workflow?

[Cmurilochem]

Thanks @JaroCamphuijsen for the suggestion. This dependency is not directly apparent into the workflow file. This is my deploy_with_Nebula job specs:

  deploy_with_NEBULA:
    needs: get_content_config
    permissions: 
      contents: write
    uses: esciencecenter-digital-skills/NEBULA/.github/workflows/deploy.yml@main
    with:
      config_artifact_name: content_config
      nebula_ref: main

So, to test it, I removed the index.md file from root dir in https://github.com/esciencecenter-digital-skills/NEBULA-content-template and after doing so, I have the following workflow error in the deploy_with_NEBULA job:

Errors prerendering:
[log] [nitro]   ├─ /api/_content/query/brX4CwCJoQ.1714729178686.json (2ms)
  │ ├── Error: [404] Document not found!
  │ └── Linked from /
  │ └── Linked from /NEBULA-content-template/
[log] [nitro]
Error:  Exiting due to prerender errors.
  at prerender (node_modules/nitropack/dist/shared/nitro.0a84349b.mjs:216:11)
  at async node_modules/nuxt/dist/index.mjs:3304:7
  at async build (node_modules/nuxt/dist/index.mjs:4772:5)
  at async Object.run (node_modules/nuxi/dist/chunks/build.mjs:95:5)
  at async Object.run (node_modules/nuxi/dist/chunks/generate.mjs:56:5)
  at async runCommand$1 (node_modules/nuxi/dist/shared/nuxi.a9f3bca7.mjs:1648:16)
  at async runCommand$1 (node_modules/nuxi/dist/shared/nuxi.a9f3bca7.mjs:1639:11)
  at async runMain$1 (node_modules/nuxi/dist/shared/nuxi.a9f3bca7.mjs:1777:7) 
Error:  Exiting due to prerender errors.
Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

Could this be a requirement from the GitHub pages side ?