Jekyll Boiler

Bare bones Jekyll example site using GitHub’s “pages” gem.

Jekyll

First, read: Using Jekyll with Pages.

Install Ruby, Bundler and Jekyll.

You’ll probably want to install RVM too. If it’s of any help, I have some related notes here.

Note that this repo is a “Project Page”, which means I need to create a gh-pages branch for this to work:

Every GitHub Page is run through Jekyll when you push content to a specially named branch within your repository. For User Pages, use the master branch in your username.github.io repository. For Project Pages, use the gh-pages branch in your project's repository. Because a normal HTML site is also a valid Jekyll site, you don't have to do anything special to keep your standard HTML files unchanged. Jekyll has thorough documentation that covers its features and usage. Simply start committing Jekyll formatted files and you'll be using Jekyll in no time.

Install missing gems:

$ cd repo/
$ bundle install

Or, update gems:

$ bundle update

Execute jekyll and serve:

$ bundle exec jekyll serve --baseurl ''

View drafts:

$ bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts --baseurl ''

View your locally-hosted site at http://localhost:4000.

Bower

Optionally, you can use Bower to install/manage front-end dependencies.

First, install the Bower packages (assuming you already have npm installed):

$ npm install

Next, edit bower.json and define desired dependency information (for documentation, read this and this).

Finally, install or update Bower dependencies:

$ npm run bower-installer

That’s it!

Note: The gh-pages gem does not support Bower; it’s up to you to manually update these front-end dependencies, every once in a while (when appropriate), via the command line on your local/development machine.

Links:

• Repository metadata on GitHub Pages
• GitHub Cheat Sheet
• Emoji cheat sheet
• Liquid for Designers
• Using Jekyll Plugins with GitHub Pages
• Deploying Jekyll to GitHub Pages