Creating a Blog with Jekyll and GitHub pages

Steps to create a sample blog created using Jekyll and hosted on GitHub.

Setup

If you want to create a similar blog you can either fork this implementation or create a new one by installing:

  • Ruby
  • Jekyll 
    gem install jekyll
jekyll new .

Development

To setup your environment with all the required plugins run the command jekyll build

The blog entries can be tested locally using the command jekyll serve and loading http://localhost:4000

New blog entries can be added to the _post folder and follow the standard markdown syntax.

GitHub pages

To view this blog goto: https://github.com/USERNAME.github.io

A number of the Jekyll plugins will not work by default with GitHub pages. I have noticed a number of issues with pagination when using custom themes. This blog for example uses the minimal Minimal Mistakes plugin which requires pagination for recent posts. At the time of writing jekyll-paginate-v2 isn’t supported by GitHub pages. It is however possible to get unsupported plugins to work via a number of alternative deployment options but the majority of these are quite complex for this introduction tutorial.

Note: its also possible to use GitLab pages

Plugins

Jekyll has many useful plugins including for example jekyll-gist which allows you to embed gists into your blog entries.

Additional