Using Jekyll/Github pages. As part of a content overhaul, we've moved a lot of pages to an external site. We'd like to clean up our Github pages repository and remove all purged files while providing a 301 redirect to the new domain where they now live.
The problem is that - according to my understanding of the docs - you must have a markdown file present with a redirect_to field. This defeats the purpose of purging the files in our repo. Is there a way to configure redirects from the _config.yml file or a plugin that allows me to do this from a single file?
I cannot see how this can be possible on the GitHub platform. As you mentioned, you can use the jekyll-redirect-from plugin but you cannot automate it through config or other data files because Jekyll sites are static and thus, the server will only look for the directory and an index file within it for each URL.
The only way you can achieve this without keeping the file structure is to move the site to a server where you configure URL rewrites within the web server such as Nginx or Apache.
Related
Hey I have a quick question. When I pushed my repository to git it no longer connects my html documents to my style sheet or corresponding images. When I open the html files from vscode in chrome it works perfectly, but as soon as I pushed it to github and deployed it, it only shows the html. Is there a way I need to change my pathing so that it will work on pages?
For example:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/CSS/style.css">
or
<img id="frogicon"src="/Images/frogiconpure.jpg" alt="frog icon">
Yeah this is a frustrating issue for me as well. The solution I use relies on running a local NodeJS server during development, which has code to redirect requests starting with /${projectName}/. I then set up all of my URLs for internal assets to work in the GitHub Pages context.
I have a template repo in GitHub that I use as a base for my new projects, which uses this approach. Here's a link to the appropriate section of the Readme: GitHub Pages
This approach works without any extra bits on GitHub Pages, but for it to work with local development it relies on two parts:
A local server that redirects URLs starting with /${projectName}/ to the root-relative paths needed for local development (server code).
An environment variable configuring the name of my project (the .env file in my setup)
If running a local NodeJS server isn't something that works for your project, there may be other ways in your environment to do the same sort of redirection. And if you're only worried about the single project, then you could hard-code the name of your project instead of having it configured as an environment variable.
I was learning about HTML domains and paths in my computer-science class. However, I have a question. What happens if you only specify a domain, such as apple.com instead of specifying a path? Does the page automatically give you the index file or something?
Thanks :)
That entirely depends on what the web server is configured to do. What you’re doing is you’re requesting a URL from a web server via HTTP. That does not inherently have anything to do with files. The web server can respond to the request in any way it wants.
But yes, most typically the average web server will look for a file named something like index.html in its webroot folder and return it.
yes, there is the default file that is returned if no path is provided
From Apache documentation
Typically, a document called index.html will be served when a directory is requested without a file name being specified. For example, if DocumentRoot is set to /var/www/html and a request is made for http://www.example.com/work/, the file /var/www/html/work/index.html will be served to the client.
From IIS documentation:
Default documents are enabled by default, and IIS 7 defines the following default document files in the ApplicationHost.config file as server-wide defaults: Default.htm, Default.asp, Index.htm, Index.html, Iisstart.htm.
(If you install ASP.NET on your Web server, the installation process will add the Default.aspx file to this list.)
Can I set up my repository so that I can see all the files (html and css) that my site uses in the repository while still using the GitHub page generator?
I want to use github.com to maintain my multi page site, without installing Jekyll locally.
After you create your github repo go to the settings and select the option to host from the docs directory I found this to be the best method to host my websites that way you done have to mess with different branches unless your in to that thing.
It is not required for you to use Jekyll I personally have never used it. It is to wordpress esq.
What you can use instead of Jekyll is a static site generator or spa to precompile your website content add the static content to the doc directory and push your repo.
Github will generate a url for your that will also be available in your settings. You can also add custom domains.
I recomd using a static site generator performance and seo is the reason.
If you create a Jekyll website on your local machine in /some/path/website/, initialise your Git repository there:
cd /some/path/website/
git init
Then you can push this to your remote Github repository and all of your files will added and viewable.
I don't think you can initialise a Jekyll website in your remote repository though.
From their documentation:
Jekyll's simplified build process with GitHub Pages is one of the biggest advantages of using Jekyll instead of other static site generators. GitHub Pages manages your site's build process with a single push to your site's publishing branch. This is Jekyll's build process for managing your site:
Push file changes to your pages publishing branch (my emphasis)
GitHub Pages publishes your site.
It turned out that the reason I was not seeing many files was that there was only the index.html that I created using the tutorial at GitHub Pages
The reason I thought there must have been other files was that the theme I picked looked a whole lot better than my helloworld.html
I am trying to use a github api to generate content in my jekyll project. Currently I can generate the desired content using the .json file locally in the _data directory. However, I want to be able to use the .json file from github every time the site is built to update the content in the project without having to manually re-download the file and place it in the project directory. Is this possible and how can this be done? Also the project is being hosted by github pages so my plugin usage is limited.
The source for my Jekyll-powered website lives in a git repo, but the website also needs to have a couple large static files that are too large to go under version control. Thus, they are not part of the Jekyll build pipeline.
I would like for these to simply live in an assets directory in the Jekyll destination (which is a server directory; note that I don't have have any control over the server here; all I can do is dump static files into a designated directory) that does not exist in the git repo. But, running jekyll build deletes everything in the output directory.
Is there a way to change Jekyll's behavior in this case? Or is there some other good way to handle this issue?
Not sure this addresses the specific case in the OP, but seeing as how I kept getting to this page when I finally found an answer here, I thought I'd add an answer to this question in case it helps others.
I have a git post-hook that builds my jekyll site in my webhost when I push to my host, but it was also deleting anything else that I had FTP'ed over. So now I've put anything I need to stick around in a directory (external/ in my case), and added the following to my _config.yml:
exclude: [external]
keep_files: [external]
and now files in external/ survive.
If you upload Jekyll's output directory via FTP to your server, you can use a FTP tool that lets you ignore folders.
For example, my own site is built with Jekyll, but hosted on my own webspace, so I'm uploading it via FTP.
I explained in this answer how I scripted the building and uploading process, so I can update my site with a single click.
In my case (Windows), I used WinSCP, a free command-line FTP client, for this.
If you're not on Windows, you need to use something else, but there are probably other FTP tools out there that are able to ignore folders.
To ignore your assets folder in WinSCP, you just need to put this line into the script file:
(the file which contains the actual WinSCP commands - read my other answer for more information)
option exclude "assets/"
Now you can upload your large assets folder on the server once, and it won't be overwritten/deleted when you later update your site via FTP.