jekyll-tutorial

jekyll-tutorial

Jekyll tutorial

#jekyll#tutorial
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Jekyll Tutorial

Setup

Installation

$ gem install jekyll bundler
  • Create a new Gemfile to list your project's dependencies:
$ bundle init
Writing new Gemfile to /path/to/jekyll/Gemfile
  • Edit the Gemfile in a text editor and add jekyll as a dependency:
gem "jekyll"
  • Run bundle to install jekyll for your project.
$ bundle
Bundle complete! 1 Gemfile dependency, 31 gems now installed.
Use `bundle info [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

$ bundle info jekyll
  * jekyll (4.3.3)
    Summary: A simple, blog aware, static site generator.
    Homepage: https://jekyllrb.com
    Source Code: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll
    Changelog: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/releases
    Bug Tracker: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues
    Path: /path/to/gems/gems/jekyll-4.3.3
  • You can now prefix all jekyll commands listed in this tutorial with bundle exec to make sure you use the jekyll version defined in your Gemfile.

Create a site

  • Create a new directory for your site
  • Create index.html in your site root directory.
  • Note: You can also create a new Jekyll site by running the jekyll new <PATH> command.
    • E.g., jekyll new myblog creates a new Jekyll site at ./myblog.
    • Jekyll will install a site that uses a gem-based theme called Minima.
    • See "Themes" section below.

Build

  • Run either of the following commands to build your site:
    • jekyll build - Builds the site and outputs a static site to a directory called _site.
    • jekyll serve - Does jekyll build and runs it on a local web server at http://localhost:4000, rebuilding the site any time you make a change.
      • To force the browser to refresh with every change, use jekyll serve --livereload.
      • Not suitable for deployment.
$ jekyll serve
Configuration file: none
            Source: /path/to/jekyll/tutorial_site
       Destination: /path/to/jekyll/tutorial_site/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
                    done in 0.005 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/path/to/jekyll/tutorial_site'
    Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

References

Directory Structure

  • A basic Jekyll site usually looks something like this:
.
├── _config.yml
├── _data
│   └── members.yml
├── _drafts
│   ├── begin-with-the-crazy-ideas.md
│   └── on-simplicity-in-technology.md
├── _includes
│   ├── footer.html
│   └── header.html
├── _layouts
│   ├── default.html
│   └── post.html
├── _posts
│   ├── 2007-10-29-why-every-programmer-should-play-nethack.md
│   └── 2009-04-26-barcamp-boston-4-roundup.md
├── _sass
│   ├── _base.scss
│   └── _layout.scss
├── _site
├── .jekyll-cache
│   └── Jekyll
│       └── Cache
│           └── [...]
├── .jekyll-metadata
└── index.html # can also be an 'index.md' with valid front matter

References

Liquid

  • Liquid is an open-source template language created by Shopify and written in Ruby.
  • It has 3 main components: objects, tags, and filters.

Objects

  • Objects tell Liquid to output predefined variables as content on a page.
  • Use double curly braces for objects: {{ and }}.
  • For example, {{ page.title }} displays the page.title variable.

Tags

  • Tags define the logic and control flow for templates.
  • Use curly braces and percent signs for tags: {% and %}.
  • For example:
{% if page.show_sidebar %}
  <div class="sidebar">
    sidebar content
  </div>
{% endif %}
  • This displays the sidebar if the value of the show_sidebar page variable is true.

Filters

  • Filters change the output of a Liquid object.
  • They are used within an output and are separated by a |.
  • For example:
{{ "hi" | capitalize }}
  • This displays Hi instead of hi.

Use Liquid

  • Use Liquid to make your Hello World! text lowercase:
...
<h1>{{ "Hello World!" | downcase }}</h1>
...
  • To make Jekyll process your changes, add "front matter" to the top of the page:
---
# front matter tells Jekyll to process Liquid
---

References

Front Matter

  • Front matter is a snippet of YAML placed between two triple-dashed lines at the start of a file.
  • You can use front matter to set variables for the page:
---
my_number: 5
---
  • You can call front matter variables in Liquid using the page variable.
  • For example, {{ page.my_number }}.

Use front matter

References

Layouts

Creating a layout

  • Layouts are templates that can be used by any page in your site and wrap around page content.
  • They are stored in a directory called _layouts.
  • Create the _layouts directory in your site's root folder and create a new default.html file.
  • This HTML is almost identical to index.html except:
    • there's no front matter, and
    • the content of the page is replaced by a content variable.
  • content is a special variable that returns the rendered content of the page on which it's called.

Variables

  • You can set front matter in layouts, the only difference is when you're using in Liquid, you need to use the layout variable instead of page.
---
city: San Francisco
---
<p>{{ layout.city }}</p>

{{ content }}

Use layouts

  • To make index.html use your new layout, set the layout variable in the front matter.
  • Since the layout wraps around the content on the page, you can call front matter like page in the layout file.
    • When you apply the layout to a page, it uses the front matter on that page.

Build the About page

References

‌

‌Includes

  • Navigation should be on every page so adding it to your layout is the correct place to do this.

Include tag

  • The include tag allows you to include content from another file stored in an _includes folder.
  • Includes are useful for having a single source for source code that repeats around the site or for improving the readability.

Include usage

Current page highlighting

  • _includes/navigation.html needs to know the URL of the page it's inserted into so it can add styling.
  • Using the page.url variable, you can check if each link is the current page and colour it red if true:
    • <a href="/includes/" {% if page.url == "/includes/" %}style="color: red;"{% endif %}>
    • <a href="/includes/about.html" {% if page.url == "/includes/about.html" %}style="color: red;"{% endif %}>

References

‌Data Files

  • Jekyll supports loading data from YAML, JSON, and CSV files located in a _data directory.
  • Data files are a great way to separate content from source code to make the site easier to maintain.

Data file usage

References

Assets

  • Place CSS, JS, images, and other assets in your site folder and they'll copy across to the built site.
  • Jekyll sites often use this structure to keep assets organized:
.
├── assets
│   ├── css
│   ├── images
│   └── js
...

Sass

  • Inlining the styles used in _includes/navigation_data.html is not a best practice.
  • Instead, let's style the current page by defining a class in a new css file: _includes/navigation_assets.html.
  • You could use a standard CSS file for styling, but we're going to take it a step further by using Sass.
    • Sass is baked right into Jekyll.
  • Create a Sass file at assets/css/styles.scss.
    • @import "main" tells Sass to look for a file called main.scss in the _sass directory by default.
  • Create the current class in order to colour the current link green at _sass/main.scss.
  • Reference the stylesheet in your layout (_layouts/default_assets.html) and add the stylesheet to the <head>.
    • styles.css referenced here is generated by Jekyll from styles.scss in assets/css/.
  • Load up http://localhost:4000/sass/ and check that the active link in the navigation is green.

References

Blogging

Posts

Layout

  • Create the layout for the blog post at _layouts/post.html.
    • This is an example of layout inheritance.
    • The post layout outputs the title, date, author and content body, which is wrapped by the default layout.
    • Also note the date_to_string filter, which formats a date into a nicer format.

List posts

  • Jekyll makes posts available with site.posts.
  • Create blog.html in your site root directory.
    • post.url is automatically set by Jekyll to the output path of the post.
    • post.title is pulled from the post filename and can be overridden by setting title in front matter.
    • post.excerpt is the first paragraph of content by default.
  • Add _data/navigation_blogging.yml for navigation.
  • Open http://localhost:4000/blogging/ and have a look through your blog posts.

References

Collections

  • Collections are similar to posts except the content doesn't have to be grouped by date.

Configuration

  • Jekyll configuration to set up a collection happens in a file called _config.yml (by default).
  • Create _config.yml in the site root directory.
  • Restart the jekyll server (bundle exec jekyll serve) to (re)load the configuration.

Add authors

  • Documents (the items in a collection) live in a folder in the root of the site named _*collection_name*, in this case, _authors.
  • Create a document for each author:

Staff page

  • Let's add a page which lists all the authors on the site.
  • Jekyll makes the collection available with site.authors.
  • Create staff.html and iterate over site.authors to output all the staff.
    • Since the content is markdown, you need to run it through the markdownify filter.
    • This happens automatically when outputting using {{ content }} in a layout.
  • You also need a way to navigate to this page through the main navigation: _data/navigation_collections.yml.

Output a page

  • By default, collections do not output a page for documents.
  • In this case we want each author to have their own page.
  • Add output: true to the author collection configuration: _config.yml.
    • Restart the jekyll server for the configuration changes to take effect.
  • You can link to the output page using author.url in staff.html.
  • Just like posts, create a layout for authors: _layouts/author.html.

Front matter defaults

  • What you want is all posts to automatically have the post layout, authors to have author layout, and everything else to use the default layout.
  • You can achieve this by using front matter defaults in _config.yml.
  • You set a scope of what the default applies to, then the default front matter you'd like.
  • Now you can omit layout from the front matter of all pages and posts.

Link to authors page

  • The posts have a reference to the author so let's link it to the author's page in in _layouts/post.html.
    • {% assign author = site.authors | where: 'short_name', page.author | first %}:
      • assign the site.authors collection to the author variable;
      • apply the where filter to create an array to include only objects where the short_name property is the post page's page.author custom variable value;
      • apply the first filter to return the first item in the array.
  • Open up http://localhost:4000/collections and have a look at the staff page and the author links on posts.

References

Deployment

Themes

  • Jekyll themes specify plugins and package up assets, layouts, includes, and stylesheets in a way that can be overridden by your site's content.
  • You can find and preview themes on different galleries: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/themes/#pick-up-a-theme.

Understanding gem-based themes

  • When you create a new Jekyll site (by running the jekyll new <PATH> command), Jekyll installs a site that uses a gem-based theme called Minima.
  • With gem-based themes, some of the site's directories (such as the assets, _data, _layouts, _includes, and _sass directories) are stored in the theme's gem.
  • In the case of Minima, you see only the following files in your Jekyll site directory:
.
├── 404.html
├── about.markdown
├── _config.yml
├── Gemfile
├── index.markdown
└── _posts
    └── 2024-05-07-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown
  • If you have the theme gem, you can run bundle update to update all gems in your project.
  • You can run bundle update <THEME>, replacing <THEME> with the theme name, such as minima, to just update the theme gem.

Overriding theme defaults

  • You can override any of the theme default data, layouts, includes, and stylesheets with your own site content.
  • To replace layouts or includes in your theme, create a file with the same name as the file you wish to override in your site's _layouts or _includes directory.
    • For example, if your selected theme has a page layout, you can override it by creating your own _layouts/page.html.
  • To modify any stylesheet you must take the extra step of also copying the main sass file (_sass/minima.scss in the Minima theme) into the _sass directory in your site's source.
  • To locate a theme's files on your computer, run bundle info --path <THEME>, e.g., bundle info --path minima.
$ bundle info --path minima
/path/to/gems/minima-2.5.1

$ tree $(bundle info --path minima)
/path/to/gems/minima-2.5.1
├── assets
│   ├── main.scss
│   └── minima-social-icons.svg
├── _includes
│   ├── disqus_comments.html
│   ├── footer.html
│   ├── google-analytics.html
│   ├── header.html
│   ├── head.html
│   ├── icon-github.html
│   ├── icon-github.svg
│   ├── icon-twitter.html
│   ├── icon-twitter.svg
│   └── social.html
├── _layouts
│   ├── default.html
│   ├── home.html
│   ├── page.html
│   └── post.html
├── LICENSE.txt
├── README.md
└── _sass
    ├── minima
    │   ├── _base.scss
    │   ├── _layout.scss
    │   └── _syntax-highlighting.scss
    └── minima.scss

5 directories, 22 files

Installing a gem-based theme

  • The jekyll new <PATH> command isn't the only way to create a new Jekyll site with a gem-based theme.
  • To install a gem-based theme:
    • Add the theme gem to your site's Gemfile, or if you've started with the jekyll new command, replace gem "minima", "~> 2.0" with the gem you want:
      • gem "jekyll-theme-minimal"
    • Install the theme:
      • bundle install
    • Add the following to your site's _config.yml to activate the theme:
      • theme: jekyll-theme-minimal
    • Build your site:
      • bundle exec jekyll serve

References

minimalacademicresumeportfoliodocumentationwikitailwindbootstrapdarkecommercegithub-pagesblog