Understanding GitHub Pages and Jekyll

GitHub Pages allows you to host websites directly from your GitHub repository. Simple as pie?

Jekyll themes?

Let’s explore the supported themes.

Some favorites:

• hacker theme seems good for obvious reasons
• midnight is a contender
• minima with some nice themes
• cayman seems smooth

Configuration

We just update the theme in the _config.yml file.
theme: jekyll-theme-chirpy

plugins

We can update the _config.yml to include new features using plugins. We can then support GitHub emojis with jemoji.

Layouts

Default layout (ex. layout: post) can be found here. You can create your own like this.

File structure (added 1/9)

Reading the docs, I apparently need to change the file structure of my posts:

├── _posts
│   ├── 2007-10-29-why-every-programmer-should-play-nethack.md
│   └── 2009-04-26-barcamp-boston-4-roundup.md

Running Jekyll locally

Then we use the GitHub pages guide to get Jekyll up and running:

1. Ruby is already installed in my WSL setup.
   • I had an old version of ruby so used ruby-install to install a newer version.
   • Ruby path /home/vthoren_u/.rubies/ruby-3.3.4/bin/ruby

      echo '# Install Ruby Gems to ~/gems' >> ~/.zshrc
      echo 'export GEM_HOME="$HOME/gems"' >> ~/.zshrc
      echo 'export PATH="$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
      alias gem="/home/vthoren_u/.rubies/ruby-3.3.4/bin/gem"
      source ~/.zshrc
     

2. Installing bundle and jekyll gem install jekyll bundler
3. Fixing the Gemfile with the version of github-pages
4. Install dependencies bundle install
5. Start jekyll bundle exec jekyll serve
6. Test! http://127.0.0.1:4000/

Continue to develop the site

The post from aleksandrhovhannisyan.com is really good at getting started!