"Page Not Found" when trying to access a site deployed on Netlify

I'm running a static blogdown site and deploy it on Netlify. I source files on GitHub, Hugo builds the site, and Netlify deploys it.

Netlify reports that the site is live (deploy log enclosed at the bottom), but when I'm trying to view my site, all I see is a Netlify error message:

Page Not found

Looks like you've followed a broken link or entered a URL that doesn't exist on this site.

← Back to our site

What could be the reason?

My GitHub Repo: https://github.com/taraskaduk/taraskaduk

My URL where the site should be: https://taraskaduk.com/

My deploy settings:

Repository: https://github.com/taraskaduk/taraskaduk
Build command: hugo
Publish directory: public
Production branch: master
Branch deploys: Deploy only the production branch and its deploy previews
Public deploy logs: Logs are public

Hugo version (I tried different ones)

HUGO_VERSION 0.37.1

My latest deploy log:

9:56:27 PM: Build ready to start
9:56:28 PM: Fetching cached dependencies
9:56:29 PM: Starting to download cache of 172.4MB
9:56:30 PM: Finished downloading cache in 1.74774892s
9:56:30 PM: Starting to extract cache
9:56:33 PM: Finished extracting cache in 2.59393707s
9:56:33 PM: Finished fetching cache in 4.428746301s
9:56:33 PM: Starting to prepare the repo for build
9:56:33 PM: Preparing Git Reference refs/heads/master
9:56:34 PM: Starting build script
9:56:34 PM: Installing dependencies
9:56:35 PM: Started restoring cached node version
9:56:37 PM: Finished restoring cached node version
9:56:37 PM: v8.11.2 is already installed.
9:56:38 PM: Now using node v8.11.2 (npm v5.6.0)
9:56:38 PM: Attempting ruby version 2.3.6, read from environment
9:56:39 PM: Using ruby version 2.3.6
9:56:39 PM: Using PHP version 5.6
9:56:39 PM: Installing Hugo 0.37.1
9:56:39 PM: Started restoring cached go cache
9:56:39 PM: Finished restoring cached go cache
9:56:39 PM: unset GOOS;
9:56:39 PM: unset GOARCH;
9:56:39 PM: export GOROOT='/opt/buildhome/.gimme/versions/go1.10.linux.amd64';
9:56:39 PM: export PATH="/opt/buildhome/.gimme/versions/go1.10.linux.amd64/bin:${PATH}";
9:56:39 PM: go version >&2;
9:56:39 PM: export GIMME_ENV='/opt/buildhome/.gimme/env/go1.10.linux.amd64.env';
9:56:39 PM: go version go1.10 linux/amd64
9:56:39 PM: Installing missing commands
9:56:40 PM: Verify run directory
9:56:40 PM: Executing user command: hugo
9:56:40 PM: Building sites …
9:56:40 PM: 
9:56:40 PM:                    | EN
9:56:40 PM: +------------------+----+
9:56:40 PM:   Pages            |  6
9:56:40 PM:   Paginator pages  |  0
9:56:40 PM:   Non-page files   | 49
9:56:40 PM:   Static files     | 39
9:56:40 PM:   Processed images |  0
9:56:40 PM:   Aliases          |  4
9:56:40 PM:   Sitemaps         |  1
9:56:40 PM:   Cleaned          |  0
9:56:40 PM: Total in 522 ms
9:56:40 PM: Caching artifacts
9:56:40 PM: Started saving pip cache
9:56:40 PM: Finished saving pip cache
9:56:40 PM: Started saving emacs cask dependencies
9:56:40 PM: Finished saving emacs cask dependencies
9:56:40 PM: Started saving maven dependencies
9:56:40 PM: Finished saving maven dependencies
9:56:40 PM: Started saving boot dependencies
9:56:40 PM: Finished saving boot dependencies
9:56:40 PM: Started saving go dependencies
9:56:40 PM: Finished saving go dependencies
9:56:40 PM: Build script success
9:56:40 PM: Starting to deploy site from 'public'
9:56:41 PM: Starting post processing
9:56:41 PM: Post processing done
9:56:41 PM: Site is live

Solution

Disclaimer: I work on the Support team @ Netlify

It's always allowed to reach out to Netlify support about things like these, though we can only really help you debug what's different about our build process than your local, rather than debugging your source code. Let me expand on some best practices that the commenters brought up, and provide some suggestions to help you debug further that are non-obvious.

First off, as suggested (thanks @aosmith!) BaseURL should be set to / - that is a best practice and will allow your site to work locally (http://localhost) but also on Netlify - via http, https, deploy previews, and finally on other hosting providers, while proxy'd to, etc etc. Just Do It :)

Second, you could have redirects not just in a _redirects file but also netlify.toml, but I also don't think that is the problem here.

When you get a 404 at your main URL, it means that you don't have a /index.html . What the root cause of that is, I can't tell (though I can tell that hugo doesn't love it when your theme is missing and may fail to produce the content you're expecting). There are two good ways to figure out why our build isn't producing an index.html in your publish folder (public, in your case and default hugo config) though:

You can download a copy of any successful deploy from the deploy logs page as shown in my screenshot, and see "what we ended up with". Typical problems here are that we have nothing (your build didn't go to public/ or that you end up without an index.html - so we correctly show a 404 without a path)
You can follow the debug instructions to run our build image locally: https://github.com/netlify/build-image#testing-locally . After the build, you're still in the build shell and can go look at what's in your publish directory.