Keep Github Pages and Hugo output in same directory? - configuration

I recently decided to generate a Github Pages website using Hugo. I wanted to keep Hugo input (configuration, themes) in the same directory as the output, for easy management. Unfortunately, Github Pages's CI complains when I try to turn public directory into a symlink into ., as well as when I create a hugo directory and make hugo/public a symlink to ... Are there any other options to keep configs and output in the same directory, bypassing that error?

I solved the problem by putting the following in my config.toml file:
publishDir = "."
As a result, I didn't need the "public" directory pointing to ..

Related

How to install this Jekyll theme correctly in order to make custom adjustments?

I'm a total newbie when it comes to Jekyll, and have encountered a big problem. I'm probably doing something wrong or missing something, but what?
I find it very confusing trying to install the "Agency Jekyll Theme" which is the first theme I'm trying out. Mostly because there are several ways to do it, the commands don't add up and there is a lot of "you can do this" embedded into what you actually have to do to install it.
These are the guides I've been following:
https://jekyllrb.com/docs/step-by-step/01-setup/
https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/jekyll-agency/1.2.0
http://jekyllthemes.org/themes/agency/
Basically, I've tried all the 3 possible ways to install it without success.
I'm running on Windows.
My problem:
jekyll serve (ran in my site folder) creates a _site folder and content in the subfolders css, img and js. Nothing else is created, not index.html, and other files needed directly under _site folder.
In my site root folder, there are only _config.yml and Gemfile, after completing the initial steps.
There seems to be a problem with actually downloading the full theme into my root folder. When I manually download the agency-jekyll-theme-starter-master.zip and extract the entire content in my root site folder, there is index.html, _data folder, etc. However, in the assets folder, there is only an img folder.
As a result, when I open http://localhost:4000/agency-jekyll-theme-starter/ in a browser there is only a directory listing with the folder "assets".
Where do the css folder and its content come from that generates under _site?
My workaround:
I run jekyll build so that the site in its entirety is placed under _site folder. However, with this process, the whole point of using Jekyll is lost because I have to edit the generated HTML files, CSS files, etc. To change simple stuff like renaming the page/navigation "Services" to another word I have to go through the HTML file and replace all occurrences
My successful attempt to reproduce your issue:
I tried this method from http://jekyllthemes.org/themes/agency/
Using the Starter Template
This is the fastest and easiest way to get up and running on GitHub Pages. Simply generate your own repository by clicking here, then replace the sample content with your own and configure for your needs.
The starter template (that is also linked on the page above) allowed me to start a code space and commit the repo content into my new branch.
I could reproduce your problem, there were no styles when running jekyll serve.
The reason for the issue:
The problem is the baseurl in the _config.yml file. It points to a relative path that does not exist in your repository. Your baseurl / path is "", because you run your server from the root folder, most probably both locally and later remotely using GitHub pages.
The solution for the issue:
In the _config.yml file in your repo, change this one line
from
baseurl: "/agency-jekyll-theme-starter" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
to
baseurl: "" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
Check out https://github.com/cadamini/jekyll-agency-test if you like.
I hope this was understandable and helpful and that you can solve your issue with these instructions. Don't hesitate to comment for further clarification.

Using YAML and Images from a single directory in Jekyll

I have a Jekyll-based and Github-pages-hosted site. I also have a Git Submodule that contains both YAML files and images. I would like to use it within my GitHub pages Jekyll project but I’m not sure how.
Here's example directory structure:
/assets/
/_data/
/MyGitSubmodule/yaml/
/MyGitSubmodule/images/
I’m used to putting YAML files in _data and images in /assets/. Is there a way to configure Jekyll also parse YAML files in another directory? Or copy static files from somewhere in _data during the build step? Or set up symlinks? That work with GitHub Pages?
I've tried:
Changing the data_dir setting to be the same as my /assets/ directory but I don't want to make my data files publicly accessible.
Creating a symbolic link on Windows with mklink /D but I get an error on servingC:/Ruby26-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.6.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.2/lib/jekyll/utils.rb:141:in initialize': Is a directory # rb_sysopen - C:/Ben/personalsite2/assets/unreal/specifiers (Errno::EISDIR)`. Also ]this page seems to imply that they work on GitHub pages](https://github.com/chetabahana/symlink) but other docs for Jekyll seem to say that they are disabled in “safe mode” and GitHub pages.
Eh in the end I solved this by putting my data_dir inside /assets/ and by by using the exclude setting in config.yml to stop it from serving some of the yml files

jekyll: keep all files in the destination folder

i have a mixed situation where i have my custom website generated in a _dev folder, and i want jekyll generated blog files to go in that same folder. of course i don't want jekyll to wipe up any of the files that are already there, but just to wipe up and rebuild the jekyll related files.
i don't want to list all the things i want to keep like this:
keep_files: [js,css,images,*.html]
plus the *.html, while building, throws an error. is there a way to tell jekyll to just wipe up and rebuild the jekyll related files only?
i can't find many options on this on the official documentation.
i'm on jekyll 3.4.3
By default Jekyll deletes the output folder before building the site. Unless you change that behaviour in source code you can build your website in a temporal folder and copy the contents replacing the old files in your website folder.
jekyll build --destination /tmp/jk
cp -r /tmp/jk/* _dev/
This way it will only replace the Jekyll related files.

gh-pages with static html can't access file when it exists

The index.html home page displays fine, however any any link will throw a 404.
The static website has folder with html in it, index link to these html with the correct path, but displays a 404.
When clicking on this link, I got a 404.
however the file is present as you can see here .
I am really banging my head on a simple html pb, which is frustrating.
I ran into this problem myself and finally discovered a simpler solution. The problem is that Jekyll ignores all files that start with _. The simple solution is to add a .nojekyll file to your docs dir.
My docs script looks like this:
"rimraf ./docs && typedoc src/ --out docs --mode modules --module commonjs --target es6 --excludePrivate && touch ./docs/.nojekyll && gh-pages -d docs -t"
touch is an npm module that creates the file and the -t flag on gh-pages is necessary to have that dot file uploaded.
Alright I though I might just answer my own question here.
Github Page doesn't allow several static HTML files.
This is not very clear to be honest on their docs, but the solution is quite simple :
Assuming your local static docs works correctly, just follow these steps :
install jekyll
gem install jekyll bundler
add a file _config.yml
in your docs or on the root of your gh-pages branch with this content:
auto: true
execute jekyll serve
And test if this works ok on the url outputed in your console
add _site in your .gitignore
push and bingo!
If you are like me using typedoc to compile typescript into nice documentation, you will run into trouble.
Because Jekyll automatically exclude from the build any files starting with _, and typedoc generates ONLY that, I wrote a simple yeoman generator that does all the replacement for you.

How can I setup Jekyll for a blog with a large image directory, so as to avoid duplicating that directory in the generated site?

I'm considering Jekyll for a site I'm putting together that will be a blog with lots of images (and other larg-ish media files). It's easy enough to to make a directory for images and then link to them as needed in the posts. But, as I understand it, when the site is generated, all the image data will be duplicated into the generated _site directory that holds the static files. Each time the site is generated the _site directory is emptied, and repopulated with the static version of the site.
Is there any way to, for example, drop a symlink to the images directory inside the site directory, and then maybe have jekyll ignore it when the static files are generated?
Or is there another way to go about this that makes more sense?
Assuming you are running on an apache web server, you can setup an Alias directive to serve images from a directory outside of the normal docroot. You need access to edit the VirtualHosts config or some other ability to create aliases directives (e.g. via a control panel).
For an example of how this would work, let's say you are storing your jekyll files under a directory called "/web/jekyll". To get your images directory do the following:
Add an "_images" directory along with your basic jekyll tree. Ending up with something like:
_config.yml
_images/
_layouts/
_posts/
_site/
index.md
Update your apache config to add the Alias directive like:
Alias /images /web/jekyll/_images
Reload the apache config and run jekyll to build the site.
Since the image directory name starts with an underscore, jekyll won't push/copy it to the output _site during the build. Apache will happily serve most files from your _site directory as normal, but when it sees something like "http://jekyll/images/test.jpg", instead of looking for the file under "/web/jekyll/_site/_images/test.jpg", it'll serve it from "/web/jekyll/_images/test.jpg".
Incidentally, I like a little more separation of the source content and output content than jekyll defaults to. So, I setup my directory structure as follows:
/web/jekyll/html/
/web/jekyll/images/
/web/jekyll/source/
/web/jekyll/source/_config.yml
/web/jekyll/source/_layouts
/web/jekyll/source/_posts
/web/jekyll/source/index.md
With the following option set in _config.yml
destination: ../html
And the apache alias directive setup with:
Alias /images /web/jekyll/images
Jekyll is run in the "/web/jekyll/source" directory, but output is sent to the "/web/jekyll/html" dir. Similar to the first example, calls to "http://jekyll/images/test.jpg" are served from "/web/jekyll/images/test.jpg". This setup doesn't really make a difference from a site serving perspective. I just like the cleaner separation between the raw source files, the fully baked output files and the images which work via the alias.
Correct, the first part of the jekyll command removes everything in the destination directory. The problem with that is the symlinks must be manually created again. So next, go ahead and create a script that does this each time.
Be sure that:
exclude: [jekyll, css, img] in the _config.yml file
linux: The ";" symbol runs first, second, third.. commands.
script: A file named jekyll with executable permissions containing
jekyll;
ln -s /var/www/css /var/www/_site/css;
ln -s /var/www/img /var/www/_site/img;
Finally run (./jekyll) that program instead of jekyll.
-Dan
Make a project page for the images.
Set up directory structure
/home/git/svnpenn.github.io
/home/git/img
Run Jekyll
# We cant add the symlink until after jekyll is done. We will remove the
# site folder and wait for it to rebuild.
rm -r _site
jekyll --server &
while [ ! -f _site/index.html ]
do
sleep 1
done
ln -s ../images _site/images
Note I was using this because I thought it would help publish time on GitHub
pages. It does not. GitHub can take 1-10 minutes to publish depending on the
server.
I know this has already been answered, but I went a slightly different route. I hosted all of my images in a public directory on Dropbox and use grunt to generate a manifest of the images. It keeps my repository small because the images don't get checked in. I detailed it a while back in a blog post.