Customize Jekyll remote theme for GitHub Pages - jekyll

I'm new to using Jekyll theme for GitHub page. I was able to successfully customize a local theme following Customizing your Jekyll theme's CSS but I couldn't find any documentation about what to do if the theme is remote.
Here is what I tried. First, I started with a clean GitHub page and followed step 4 in Adding a Jekyll theme in your site's _config.yml file to opt-in my theme that's forked from GitHub's default theme
_config.yml:
github: [metadata]
encoding: UTF-8
kramdown:
input: GFM
hard_wrap: false
future: true
jailed: false
- theme: jekyll-theme-primer
+ remote_theme: chuanqisun/primer
gfm_quirks: paragraph_end
At this point, everything just works out-of-the-box. But when I add
---
---
#import "{{ site.theme }}";
in /assets/css/style.scss, GitHub Page complaints that site.theme doesn't exist.
So I also tried
---
---
#import "{{ site.remote_theme }}";
but the import still failed.
Does anyone know if it is possible to customize a remote theme? I know that I can just make customization in my forked repository but some customization are specific to one site and I want to store that in my site's repo. This way I can share the theme with multiple sites without enforcing one site's customization to the rest of the sites. Thanks!

For anyone in a similar situation, here is what worked for me, using the Minimal mistakes theme as a remote theme.
It has no assets/css/style.scss, but an assets/css/main.scss that then imports all the partial files under _sass. Trying to import main or empty brackets as the official docs suggest, doesn't work. The way to go is to copy the main theme's file and then customize it.
So in this case I created a local copy of assets/css/main.scss and appended the desired css changes. That was enough. If a theme doesn't have one central file tying everything together, you might need to copy more files, but that's it.

Related

Github Pages - trouble rendering a Page with Jekyll

Whilst using Github Pages I can't get Jekyll to render a contact page.
I am using the following template: https://github.com/antonostrovsky/tale
If I clone the template into a local repo and run bundle exec jekyll serve I get a page with a Contact link that I can successfully follow. The generated _site folder contains a subfolder 'contact' with index.html within it.
I then create an empty repository (https://github.com/antonostrovsky/test_site) at Github and specify this template in _config.yml:
remote_theme: antonostrovsky/tale
The template is successfully rendered, I can see the template on the index page (https://antonostrovsky.github.io/test_site/), and the Contact link leads to nowhere, resulting in "Not Found" error.
Can anyone please help me understand how I can troubleshoot this? Does Jekyll have any debug output that could be placed on a github page?
Does anyone know what could be going wrong?
Thank you in advance
I made a diff between your repo and the template repo and noticed that at some stage you deleted the baseurl property in the _config.yml file.
Forking your repo and re-adding baseurl: "/tale" to the _config.yml file fixes the contact page link for me.
UPDATE:
While the above gets the page working as a fork it doesn't work as a remote template which is what the asker needs.
The test_site has the theme and it builds, however it has no content. There are no pages in test_site repo.
If you copy your contact.md page from the theme template repo into pages/contact.md in the test site repo and then rebuild then your link should now work.
Note: Neither the file nor folder can start with an _ in the test-site repo because it will get skipped over by jekyll.
Tip: Open the dev console and disable page caching then reload to see your changes on github faster. It also helps to add change some page content so that you know you're seeing the most recent version.
To add to the accepted answer and explain this strange behaviour. Pages from the remote theme are NOT included by design:
Custom theme files can be placed in:
assets/allposts.html
with the front matter
---
permalink: allposts.html
---
which results in the
_site/allposts.html
file being generated.
Source: https://github.com/benbalter/jekyll-remote-theme/issues/64

Adding Jekyll (only the blog portion) to my website

I wish to add Jekyll (only the blog portion) to my already existing website. I currently have this repo on my Github (https://github.com/TonyHoanTrinh/TonyHoanTrinh.github.io). Where I currently have a folder for Images. An index.html, main.js and style.css files.
My question is how would I be able to add the Jekyll blog portion to my website which already has a layout and theme?
I've been looking at several Jekyll tutorials but they have it start the project from the beginning using a theme and etc. I already have a website with a layout and styling from myself. But I wish to add the Jekyll blog portion to my website. I noticed an existing post on doing this but its from the context of config.yml and other files which I'm not sure pertains to my project.
My question is how would I be able to add the Jekyll blog portion to my website which already has a layout and theme?
With Jekyll you can do that very easily. Just follow these steps:
You can leave the static html files in the root (and subdirectories). They will not collide with Jekyll.
Create an empty _config.yml file in the root.
Create a layout your posts overview and for your single post layout in a _layouts folder in the root.
Create a _posts folder in the root and add your first file/blog post in this format: 2018-12-31-happy-new-year.md
Make sure the blog post (.md file) looks like this:
---
title: Happy New Year
---
Your content
Now run 'jekyll serve' from the command line in the root of your website. Jekyll (if installed correctly) will create a _site folder with the generated website (in plain HTML).
That is all! More info about setting up Jekyll can be found at the Jekyll website.

Jekyll theme is working on local, but not working on remote

I forked this theme and created a simple pages, modified some css files - setting fonts for specific tags or disable italic on subheadings.
It works like a charm in local. But when I commit the files and push the repo, It shows contents but the design things are gone! I mean, It shows only html contents.
This is the page on local environment:
And this is the page on the remote server..?
I can use basic tags and change some properties of tags in CSS, but I don't know about more details.. Could you please give me some kinds of guide or how to fix this problem?
Edit -- Here is my git repository:
https://github.com/soldier4443/soldier4443.github.io
In _config.yml, remove baseurl: "/blog" to read baseurl: "".
FYI- if your theme is working locally but not working remotely(OP didn't have an issue with this, though this was my mistake), make sure that the remote repository is named .github.io
More info. from the official documentation: "GitHub Pages are initially configured to live under the username.github.io subdomain, which is why repositories must be named this way even if a custom domain is being used."
source: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/github-pages/

Why site.baseurl doesn't work on Jekyll?

i have been trying to create jekyll site and host on git-pages. Localy everything works fine. But on github-pages works only first pages and 10 newest blog post.
But after going to any of other pages like "Blogas" or "Straipniai" every link starts with 'localhost:4000' and naturaly breaks css, javascript...
And i am not sure where is problem, because everything is same even if i make change in /_includes/header.html site.url to site.baseurl.
Here is git-hub
And site
I think the problem is that you somehow have both a .md and an .html version of the same pages. The .html version you built locally and GH is preferring it. it has localhost in the urls so it won't work. Try deleting the .html files in those sub folders and see what happens. For example, delete the index.html file from invisibleghostt.github.io/blogas/ and see if that page is fixed.
No idea how you got those files in there, they should not be there.
Look, there are a few things you'd better fix on your _config.yml:
url: "http://codas.lt" # add the site url
gems: # remove `jekyll` from gems
- jekyll-sitemap
- jekyll-gist
- octopress
include: [".htaccess"] # remove this line (GitHub Pages does not support .htaccess)
The other thing is, you'll need to remove all the folders from the folder _posts, as explained here:
If you organized your categories as
/_posts/code/2008-12-24-closures.md, you will need to restructure your
directories to put the categories above the _posts directories, as
follows: /code/_posts/2008-12-24-closures.md.
You are probably working locally with a Jekyll version which diverges from GitHub Pages' (currently is Jekyll 3.0.3). That's why your site works locally and doesn't work there. To avoid that, build Jekyll with Bundler (a dependency manager). On this answer you can see how to do that, step-by-step.
Hope to have helped! :)
Note: If you get stuck in how to adapt your theme to work with GitHub Pages, you can try GitLab Pages, as you can easily set the Jekyll version you want to use to build your site. For example, this project builds the site with Jekyll 2.5.3.

Why is just the HTML showing after I push my changes from Jekyll to Github Pages?

I am creating a blog on Jekyll for the first time and I am at the point where I'm trying to deploy what I have so far to github pages. When I serve the site and view it locally, it looks fine - so I thought that all I had to do was push all of the files to a gh-pages branch. Now that I have done this, all that is showing is the HTML.
To troubleshoot, I downloaded just the template files and pushed those to a Github page to see if the issue had to do with how I was editing the CSS, but when I did that I got the same results.
I came across an article that was specifically about how to use github pages to store a jekyll site, and it said to remove the slash before the css folder in the linked stylesheets on the HTML if your page isn't styled correctly. After reading that I thought that the slash was for sure the issue, but after removing the slash... I got the same result.
I have been trying for hours and I feel like its probably something very simple(such as the slash).
Here is the repo:
https://github.com/pacalabre/blog-site/tree/gh-pages
Here is the output:
http://pacalabre.github.io/blog-site/
Thank you in advance for any answers!
You need to add/edit:
baseurl: /blog-site
to the config file. Note there is no trailing slash. 'blog-site' is the name of your project, the project name becomes a sub directory that serves your site. Without the baseurl setting, your relative urls are trying to fetch things from http://pacalabre.github.io/ when they are really at http://pacalabre.github.io/blog-site/.
GH is serving your site as a subfolder to the domain and your references are not taking that into account.
Once you add the baseurl setting, you then need to add {{site.baseurl}} in front of your assets like images, css and js.
Also, once you do the baseurl setting, when you serve locally it will not be quite correct, you will need to add the /blog-site to the end of the localhost url for it to work properly.
You also should try using the dev tools inspector in Chrome to help you troubleshoot, it will clearly tell you right now that it cannot load all your js files or images, and it will show where it is trying to load them from.
Look, there's something wrong with your site/repo.
I didn't find your _config.yml at the site root ( gh-pages branch). It should be there.
There's a binary file there (probably Mac's file if I'm not mistaken). It shouldn't be there.
There are both Jekyll's folders (_posts, _drafts, _layouts, etc) and _site folder there. You need to choose. Or you upload the _site content (not the folder itself) or you upload the Jekyll project. Usually you upload just Jekyll folders and GH build the site for you, unless you use some plugins which are not allowed by GitHub. In this case, you upload just the _site content, which is the compiled site (html, CSS, js only).
On the previous answer, you were instructed to add a baseurl to your site configuration. It's the best approach, but if your template uses just url and doesn't even mention baseurl, the best way is adding the project name to the end of the url, not searching for every link to call {{ site.baseurl }} via liquid. So, instead of giving yourself all this trouble, better do like that in your _config.yml:
url: http://username.github.io/projectname
If you indeed go for setting up the baseurl, you can view your site locally via localhost:4000 by adding this flag when serving Jekyll: --baseurl "". So, jekyll serve --watch --baseurl "". This means like "Jekyll, ignore the baseurl set in the config". Got it?
Serving Jekyll with bundler is the right way to do that, specially when deploying to GH Pages. But this is another story, I can add a comment later if you're interested.
Suggestions. Read a little more about how Jekyll works. Also look for .gitignore so you won't upload to GH anything unnecessary (like that binary file).
After that, if your site doesn't build or display correctly, let me know and I'll help you out if you want.
Hope to have helped!