Generator-jekyllrb
Supercharge Jekyll development with Yeoman. Yo, Jekyllrb!
Generator-jekyllrb wraps the Jekyll static site generator in a Yeoman development workflow. Scaffold your site with Yo, manage front end packages with Bower, and automate development and build tasks with Grunt.
Generator-jekyllrb is ideal for developing performant static sites and prototyping dynamic sites and apps (especially if the final version uses Yeoman too). It's also a great introduction to Yeoman if you're not familiar with JavaScript MV* frameworks.
FAQ
Common problems? Common questions? Check out the FAQ.md
Features
During setup you can choose:
- Compass, Sass, or vanilla CSS
- CoffeeScript or vanilla JavaScript
- Automatic CSS vendor prefixing with Autoprefixer
- Default Jekyll or HTML5 Boilerplate templates
- Common Jekyll configuration options
Generator-jekyllrb always includes:
- Built in preview server with BrowserSync
- Automatic Jekyll and preprocessor compiling
- Code quality checks with Jshint and/or CoffeeLint, CssLint, and
jekyll doctor - An automatic build process that includes concatenation, image optimization, CSS and HTML minification, JS uglification, and asset revving to bust those caches
Getting Started
- generator-jekyllrb requires Node.js
>= 0.10, Ruby>= 1.9 - Install the generator:
npm install -g generator-jekyllrb - Run:
yo jekyllrb
Grunt Workflow
grunt serve
Compiles all files and opens the site in your default browser. A watch task watches for changes to files, recompiles if necessary, and injects the changes into the browser with LiveReload.
grunt check
Checks code quality with Jshint and CSS Lint, and Jekyll health with jekyll doctor.
grunt build
Builds an optimized site to the dist directory. Usemin blocks are concatenated, CSS, images, and HTML are minified, JavaScript is uglified, and assets are revved for cache busting.
grunt serve:dist will run grunt build and open the result in your default browser
grunt deploy
During scaffolding the generator gives you the option to configure grunt-build-control to version and deploy your built code to a remote repository. If you configure build-control, grunt deploy will run grunt check, grunt test, grunt build, and then commit and deploy your built code to the specified remote repository.
grunt (default)
grunt on its own is a special task that runs grunt check, any tests you've added, and grunt build.
Individual tasks and :targets
Every task and target in the Gruntfile can be run individually (e.g., grunt jshint:all or grunt compass:server). Edit the tasks and add new ones to fit your needs.
Bower, components, and Usemin
Bower is a package manager for front-end components. Use it to download and manage CSS, JavaScript, and preprocessor tools for your site. Everything in the _bower_components directory is available while running grunt serve.
To include components in the build, place them inside of a Usemin block or add them to the copy:dist task. This workflow will be streamlined with the release of Usemin 2.0.
More on Yeoman and Grunt
Getting started with Yeoman
Getting started with Grunt
Migrating an existing site
Wrapping an existing site in Yeoman isn't hard, but it takes a little manual editing.
- Generate a new Yeoman/Jekyll app with the same tools and directory structure as your own. Ignore the templating options.
- Transfer any custom configuration from your _config.yml to the newly generated _config.yml.
- If you're using Compass, transfer custom configuration from your config.rb to the
compasstask in the Gruntfile. - Delete everything inside the Yeoman app directory.
- Delete your site's original _config.yml, config.rb, and any files generated by Jekyll, CSS preprocessors, or CoffeeScript. Copy the remaining site into the app directory.
- Wrap any asset references in your copied layout files with usemin blocks. The asset target paths you enter in
useminblocks should match the paths you entered during setup, as these are now expected byusemin,autoprefixerand other task configurations in your Gruntfile. - Test that everything is working correctly by running
grunt serve,grunt dist, andgrunt serve:dist. Check that the files you expect are being transferred to the dist directory. - If you were versioning the _site directory, move its .git folder to the dist directory.
Notes
Nested asset directories and Jekyll
Jekyll can't exclude nested directories, so we must exclude all directories that match the innermost asset directory. For example, assets/css will exclude all directories named css from Jekyll compilation. This will cause issues if your site has a tag or category named css; if you're worried about accidental exclusions prefix all asset directories with an underscore (assets/_css).
Absolute path to assets in CSS
Since we revision assets such as images, make sure that your CSS calls them using their absolute path, so on grunt build those images will be replaced properly.
Incorrect:
body {
background: url('../images/foo.jpg');
}
Correct:
body {
background: url('/images/foo.jpg');
}
Contribute
Please read the contributing guidelines before posting an issue.
Post bugs and feature requests to the Github issue tracker. In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Lint and test your code using Grunt.
