Intro: Github pages and jekyll

Jekyll is a great platform for publishing content, but it can be quite difficult to get up and running on a local environment due to its dependencies.

Step 1: Github Pages

Step 2: Jekyll

What is Jekyll

Jekyll is a static site generator, typically used for blogs. It processes a folder containing different items like posts, drafts, layouts and converts it into a fully fledged static html site that you can publish. The folder is typically stored in version control, and a build pipeline takes care of processing that folder and publishing a new site.

In order to process that folder, you need to have the jekyll executable and all of its dependencies.

jekyll new my-blog (to create a new folder structure)
jekyll build (to process the folder structure, and generate an html site)
jekyll serve (to run an http server on your local environment)

However, as stated before, in order to run the jekyll executable on your environment, you’ll need to have a lot of dependencies in place.

Build Jekyll in container

dockerfile

FROM ruby:2.6
RUN gem install jekyll bundler
WORKDIR /src
ENTRYPOINT bundle update && bundle exec jekyll serve \
  --host 0.0.0.0 --config _config.yml

command

docker build -t my-jekyll-env -f Dockerfile .
docker run --name my-jekyll-env \
  --mount type=bind,source=$(pwd)/src,target=/src \
  -p 4000:4000 \
  -it \
   my-jekyll-env

The –mount flag shares my local files with the container.
The -p flag automatically forwards port 4000 outside the container to port 4000 inside the container.
The -it flag connects my terminal to the server, so that I can use Ctrl-C to quit.

Step 3: Jekyll Themes

Step 4: Making Pages in Jekyll

Step 5: Adding Google Analytics to your Jekyll blog