Creating A Website With Jekyll

I’ve been slowly transitioning my websites from Wordpress to Jekyll for a few reasons, most notable that a static website doesn’t have a database that can be hacked, and that it’s inherinitely faster in getting to the user, plus it’s always fun to learn something new. As a part of jekyll, you’ll also likely want to explore Markdown and Liquid. You can follow the offical documentation, or mine:

If you’re transitioning from Wordpress to Jekyll, use this plugin.

Prerequisites

You’ll need to have ruby, gem, and bundle installed.

$ ruby -v

$ gem -v

$ bundle --version

If either of these don’t return a version number, get them installed.

Getting started

You likely want to install a theme, so look through the various theme websites and download the one you like the best.

I chose the jekyll-rtd-theme for votekris.com so I did:

$ git clone https://github.com/rundocs/jekyll-rtd-theme.git

$ cd jekyll-rtd-theme

$ sudo gem update

$ sudo bundle update

$ bundle exec jekyll serve

You should now be able to go to http://127.0.0.1:4000/ in your browser and see the basic theme website! You can hit ctrl+c to stop it, and then edit _config.yml for the settings of that theme. After that, you should follow the documentation for that theme to edit the other files and directories. For markup, refer to the kramdown reference manual.

Once you think you’ve got everything edited as appropriate, you can run $ bundle exec jeykll serve in a terminal, and now every time you edit a page or post and save it, this command will automagically integrate the changes, and you can reload the page in your browser to see your changes in real time just a website user would see them.