Why pages are not generated for a site created with --blank? - jekyll

Question

Note: I may have hit an edge case for Jekyll running in a Linux for Windows 10 environment. The same data used on pure Windows or in pure Linux work as expected (after the modifications following #marcanuy's answer). I will be back after more testing.
I created a new site via
jekyll new myblog --blank
This created the expected structure in myblog. I added a template _layouts/docs.html
<h1>hello world</h1>
{{ content }}
I then created a _posts/hello.md file:
---
title = the hello world page
layout = docs
---
# this is a hello world page
Hello world everyone
After running
# jekyll build
Configuration file: none
Source: /root/myblog
Destination: /root/myblog/_site
Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
Generating...
done in 0.03 seconds.
Auto-regeneration: disabled. Use --watch to enable.
my _site folder is empty, except for an index.html file copied from the root of my blog (copied verbatim - this is the content I put in index.html in the root)
Why isn't hello.html generated? I expected it to contain
<h1>hello world</h1>
<h1>this is a hello world page</h1>
Hello world everyone

Answer 1

There are two problems that makes jekyll not build the "hello" page:
filename
if you put hello.md inside the _posts folder, then the correct filename should contain post's date like: 2017-05-21-hello.md
Then it will be available:
.
├── _drafts
├── index.html
├── _layouts
│   └── docs.html
├── _posts
│   └── 2017-05-21-hello.md
└── _site
├── hello.html
└── index.html
Another approach is to publish it as a page:
in /hello.md, i.e.: at root level (not inside /_posts)
.
├── _drafts
├── hello.md
├── index.html
├── _layouts
│   └── docs.html
├── _posts
└── _site
├── hello.html
└── index.html
frontmatter
The other problem is the syntax of the front matter of hello.md, each attribute should be defined with : instead of =:
---
title: the hello world page
layout: docs
---
# this is a hello world page
Hello world everyone