Jekyll site variables not rendering in includes or layouts - jekyll

I'm working on a Jekyll site with GitHub Pages and have found that {% include myinclude.html %} liquid works just fine inside _includes and _layout files. However, when adding elements to the _config.yml such as author : myusername and attempting to use them either in the _layouts/default.html or _includes/myinclude.html as {{ site.author }}, the resulting text is just blank. To note, these changes are not committed or pushed and I'm using a local jekyll instance installed on the Linux Subsystem for Windows.
Outside of _includes and _layout in my actual pages the site variables work just fine. Why would the site variables not be displayed? At the moment I have to place the actual values back into the page.

The above is the intended behaviour, every change to _config.yml needs the development server to be restarted to process new settings.
The configuration file can't be re-read when using watch, because it
contains things like source and destination. It could only work if it
were actually like running jekyll build multiple times
source

With the assumption that edits to the _config.yml would update automatically, as Jekyll does for edits to other files, I had not restarted the jekyll instance I originally started. Simply closing the Jekyll instance and starting it back up, with bundle exec jekyll serve in my case, read the updated config file and the {{ site.variables }} appeared and showed correctly as I expected.
Any changes to the _config.yml require restarting the Jekyll instance.

Related

Github Pages and Jekyll permalinks going to different paths

I have a site running locally with Jekyll and deployed to GitHub Pages without any issues.
The issue I have is with GitHub pages and local permalinks.
https://username.github.io/my-repositary
and localhost is going to the root
http://localhost:4000/
So adding a page About in the root and linking to ends up looking like this
https://username.github.io/about
http://localhost:4000/about
Rather than the desired outcome
https://username.github.io/my-repositary/about
http://localhost:4000/about
Jekyll allows you to specify a subpath for the page you are generating via the baseurl option in the _config.yml file. In this case, yours should add this line to it:
baseurl: /my-repositary

Jekyll command bundle exec jekyll serve automatically loads site made previously

I am working with Jekyll on a new project. I created a new project by running jekyll new [folder name] then ran bundle exec jekyll serve. However every time I run that command files from a former jekyll project get put in the folder! I am not using this project anymore (more of me learning jekyll on my own) so I even deleted the folders. Still, this old site files get loaded.
I even tried serving the site over a different port number (4001, not 4000), and uninstalling and reinstalling the jekyll gem. What is going wrong? Thanks!
This is resolved.
I ended up creating a blank default index file in the root. When I did this and ran jekyll serve, the index file of the former site ceased to be generated. Still generated another page from the site, but I am assuming I can prevent that the same way.

Installing Jekyll to a live HTML website

I am trying to deploy Jekyll, I can do so successfully when deploying it as a new website. I want to deploy it to a subfolder named Blog '/mysite/Blog'. I understand that localhost:4000 initializes jekyll to deploy, but how does this work when i want to link to it from the main site '/mysite/blog/'. This results in just the site directory showing as shown:
I am having trouble finding documentation targeting this specific problem. I dont want to deploy this to the live site unless im 100% sure
I understand that localhost:4000 initializes jekyll to deploy
No, it doesn't.
That's the default URL of the development server… which you use for development, not deployment.
See the basic usage instructions:
$ jekyll build
# => The current folder will be generated into ./_site
You have static files. Copy them to your live server as you would any other static files.
You just have to set baseurl in _config.yml :
baseurl: /blog
Verify that resources are called with {{ site.baseurl }}{{ page.url }} or {{ site.baseurl }}/path/to/asset.js/css/jpg.
During development (jekyll serve) you will reach your site at localhost:4000/blog/ and you can deploy this code in you site/blog folder.

How to detemine if jekyll running locally or in production site?

There is a config param in jekyll called production_url. I can't find any information on how to use it.
Ideally i would like to be able to generate permalinks with local url when it is being run with serve param and with production url when run with build param.
How could I do that?
When you build your Jekyll website, it’s possible to specify the environment it’s using for the build with the JEKYLL_ENV environment variable:
$ JEKYLL_ENV=production jekyll build
If you don’t set JEKYLL_ENV explicitly, it defaults to development.
{% if jekyll.environment == "production" %}
// Production environment.
{% endif %}
Github Pages automatically sets the environment to production.
I don't see the variable production_url in the current release (v1.4.1), so this may be a dated question--but I was just looking for this answer myself. There is a baseurl property that can be set with a flag and so to change the path to your files, but it only adjusts the relative path.
jekyll serve --baseurl '/blog'
What you can do is to use the -config option to specify a configuration file for development.
Jekyll Documentation
Your production configuration variables are defined in _config.yml. One option is to create a separate configuration file for development.
--config _config-dev.yml
You can also (as I do) override variables defined in a second configuration file.
--config _config.yml,_config-dev.yml
If you use the liquid templates for site links like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ site.base_url }}/stylesheets/blog.css">
then you can override the base_url property during local devlopment
base_url: http://localhost:4000
and run jekyll in "Development"
jekyll serve -w --config _config.yml,_config-dev.yml
jekyll serve will call jekyll build, so you can't really use those two as a way to output different URL schemes.
I built a Jekyll plugin that does this with a Liquid Filter and one user defined variable in your _config.yml called mode.
You set the mode to development or production and the plugin takes care of the rest in your templates.
So in your template you could have a URL such as:
<img src="{{ '/img/dog.jpg' | to_absurl }}" />
When mode is development, upon Jekyll build/serve you will get a relative URL:
<img src="/img/dog.jpg" />
Locally this would be accessed as: http://0.0.0.0:4000/img/dog.jpg
When mode is production, upon Jekyll build/serve you will get an absolute URL:
<img src="http://www.domain.tld/img/dog.jpg" />
The http://www.domain.tld is what you have set in _config.yml -> url variable.
You can see more details on the plugin here:
http://jhaurawachsman.com/2013/jekyll-url-helper-filter-plugin/
This also worked for me:
$ JEKYLL_ENV=production jekyll serve

Considering moving from WordPress to Jekyll: What goes where?

I'm trying to figure out what would be required to move my current blog from WordPress to Jekyll, as MySQL is really too complex for my taste at this point. I've read the docs on GitHub about Configuration, Usage etc, but Installation is less clear.
I assume that since posts, layouts and other files are kept locally, that the required Ruby gems are as well? At the same time, I've seen others talk about installing to a web host (Dreamhost in my case), which would be ideal, but I'm still not sure.
Also, I'm using Mercurial instead of Git for SCM, so I would probably need to make sure I can use something like Hg-Git to help deploy things. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I think your question can be answered from two standpoints: 1) How to get Jekyll up and running and 2) How to get your current Wordpress content into jekyll. Here's answers to get you started with each in turn.
Part 1 - Getting Jekyll Up and Running
The first thing to realize is that Jekyll is designed to generate a set of static HTML files that can be served from basically any web server without the need for PHP, Ruby, Perl or any other dynamic server side processing.
Of course, Jekyll uses Ruby, so you have to have that running wherever you do the file generation. While that could be on the same server that serves the file the important point is that it doesn't have to be. For example, all of these are valid workflows for posting with Jekyll:
Create raw files on your personal machine, run Jekyll there to generate the static HTML files and then transfer them to your remote web server for the world to see.
Run Jekyll directly on your server doing all editing and creation of raw files there to have Jekyll process them for serving by the web server software on that machine.
Run Jekyll on your server machine, but edit the raw files on your local machine and push them to the server when you are ready to post. The Jekyll engine will take the raw files and do the static HTML file generation on the server itself.
People also have much more complex setups that allow them to post from either their laptops, their phones and the server itself and get everything synced up across the board via Dropbox. You can get as creative as you want with that, but I think the simplest one to get started with is the first one. Edit your raw files locally, run Jekyll locally and then transfer the resulting HTML files to your web server when you're ready for them to go live.
Installing Jekyll Locally
Obviously, you'll need Jekyll installed on your local machine for this. Directions for that can be found on the Github page. For myself, running Mac OS X 10.6, the following commands got me setup.
sudo gem install rubygems-update
sudo update_rubygems
sudo gem update
sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rails
sudo gem install maruku
sudo gem install jekyll
Note: I don't think you actually need rails, but those are the steps I went through and they worked for me
Setting Up To Use Jekyll
Once you have Jekyll on your machine, getting a basic site setup is relatively simple. Create the following structure in an empty directory:
Directories:
_layouts
_posts
_site
Files and their content:
_config.yml
safe: false
auto: false
server: false
server_port: 4000
base-url: /
source: .
destination: ./_site
plugins: ./_plugins
future: true
lsi: false
pygments: false
markdown: maruku
permalink: date
maruku:
use_tex: false
use_divs: false
png_engine: blahtex
png_dir: images/latex
png_url: /images/latex
rdiscount:
extensions: []
kramdown:
auto_ids: true,
footnote_nr: 1
entity_output: as_char
toc_levels: 1..6
use_coderay: false
coderay:
coderay_wrap: div
coderay_line_numbers: inline
coderay_line_numbers_start: 1
coderay_tab_width: 4
coderay_bold_every: 10
coderay_css: style
This is the default configuration setup for Jekyll. You can get away without this file, but it throws a warning when the process runs that it can't find the file. So, I'd go ahead and set it up. It also makes it much easier to mess around with stuff instead of sending arguments to jekyll on the command line.
_layouts/default.html
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>My Jekyll Site</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- This will be replaced with your content -->
{{ content }}
{{ site.posts }}
</body>
</html>
The {{ content }} string will be replaced by the processed content of the "index.md" file listed below. The {{ site.posts }} string will be replaced by a reverse chronological listing of the files in the "_posts" directory. GitHub has a full list of the template code snippets.
_posts/2011-07-29-my-first-jekyll-post.md
---
layout: default
---
# My first Jekyll post.
This is the content from 2011-07-29-my-first-jekyll-post.md
index.md
---
layout: default
---
# My Jekyll site
This is the content from index.md
It's worth pointing out here that you could use .html or .textile files instead of .md versions. As long as the had the YAML Front Matter, which is the first three lines consisting of the dashes and "layout: default", they will be processed by Jekyll.
Generating Static Files With Jekyll
Now that your starting file and directory structure is setup, simply bring up your command prompt, go to the directory where you create the index.md file and run the command jekyll. Assuming everything went well, you should see a short log of the process and you'll have two HTML files now sitting under:
_site/index.html
and
_site/2011/07/29/my-first-jekyll-post.html
It's worth pointing out Markdown (.md) files for the raw file source. You can also use .textile or .html as well.
Transferring/Deploying Files.
The last step with this approach is simply to use FTP or rsync to push the files up to the root of your web server and share them with the world. Since they are flat HTML, it should be quick and painless getting pretty much any hosting provide ready to go for them.
(In your question you mention Git and Mercurial. You can use either to do version control and/or deploy your raw files as well as the static HTML files the Jekyll generates, but neither is required for Jekyll to run or to transfer your files. It's all about how you want to setup the deployment process.)
Part 2 - Migrating Data From WordPress
Everything above has been about using Jekyll itself starting effectively from scratch. If you have been using WordPress (or any other engine for that matter) and want to keep the pages and posts you generated there, you'll need to migrate them from WordPress to Jekyll.
The basic idea is that you would move your posts and pages into corresponding locations inside the Jekyll directory and let it take over from there. I would start your research on that topic on the Jekyll Blog Migrations page.
(On a personal note, my first attempt at a WordPress migration didn't work out of the box. I haven't had a chance to jump back into it to get it going, but I'm committed to making it work. Moving to a much simpler static site that reduces the potential security issues, loads faster and is easier to maintain is totally worth having to deal with a migration for me.)
After you installed jekyll, you can try this wordpress plugin https://github.com/benbalter/wordpress-to-jekyll-exporter
As I understand it, Jekyll produces static HTML sites. Of course Jekyll consists of some Ruby software, but that's something you can run on any computer (e.g. your home computer rather than the web server). This way, your web hosting needs can be satisfied by simple static systems such as Github Pages. Now, Github can handle the Jekyll invocation for you automatically, but in general the idea is to upload static HTML to dumb web servers.
I don't think there's any need to use Git specifically with Jekyll-created sites—I'm sure even FTP would be fine.