jekyll not generating index.html - jekyll

I have been using Jekyll for my blog and it has been working fine. Now I am trying to add new posts from a computer running Ubuntu 14.04 and Jekyll 2.4.0. The problem is that, only on this computer, it does not generate index.html in _site.
I can't find anything in the documentation that helps, and in any event, I'm using git so I have the same configuration on all of my machines.
So the question is: How does one turn off generation of index.html in Jekyll, and how can it be turned back on?
[Update: I did gem uninstall jekyll followed by gem install jekyll, rebuilt the site, and everything works fine. The original install must not have completed properly.]

To turn generation off you can remove this file. Or to use static index.html file remove markdown section enclosed with double triple --- in header (in this case static index.html will be parsed). Also mention filename it in exclude: section of _config.yml to avoid copying to _site folder.

Related

Is there a directory that will place items in the root of _site on build?

I have a bunch of static files (basically favicons, apple-site-icons, etc) that I want to be at the root of _site when it's built. Currently they're just sitting at the root of my main code folder (along with _posts, _scss, _layouts, etc). It builds fine but it would be nice to move them into a subdirectory so the main directory isn't cluttered up (it's an OCD thing).
Is there any folder where I can put these items so they automatically copy to the root of _site when I build? I know I can write a script to do this and trigger it after the build, and there's probably an extension I could lean on, but I'm looking for a solution that just automatically moves them when I run jekyll build for simplicity.
NBD if I can't do it, just curious because I'm kind of a neat freak.
Thanks!
Jekyll allows you to do exactly that using permalinks.
Permalinks are the output path for your pages, posts, or collections. They allow you to structure the directories of your source code different from the directories in your output.
A simple example extracted from the official page is a case where you have /my-pages/about-me.html with the front matter as follows:
---
permalink: /about/
---
This way you specify the output url. In this example, you could access it in local with localhost:4000/about/
The source option. You can specify this in your _config.yml or as a command line option (https://jekyllrb.com/docs/configuration/options/). How you set this has slightly different requirements/implications.
First, move everything that belongs to the Jekyll site into a folder (e.g. "src").
Then set one of these up (assuming you have a Gemfile):
Command line option with root Gemfile:
Keep Gemfile in the root folder
Run bundle install
Run bundle exec jekyll serve --source src
Command line option with nested Gemfile:
Run BUNDLE_GEMFILE=src/Gemfile bundle install
Run BUNDLE_GEMFILE=src/Gemfile bundle exec jekyll serve --source src
Config file option:
Keep Gemfile and _config.yml in the root folder
Add source: src somewhere in your _config.yml
Run bundle install
Run bundle exec jekyll serve
Each solution here might work better with other external services building your site. There are likely other ways to set this up, but this should get you started.

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.

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.

Jekyll blog shows 404 error

I created a simple jekyll site as https://github.com/nagachinta/nagachinta.github.io, but throws 404 error. I observed the git commits I made and the commits in the git says.
" A file was included in about.md that is a symlink , doesnot exist in your '_includes', directory."
The file is not a symlink, it's just a real file.
The index files , etc are real files not symlinks.
You're using Jekyll 3.2 locally. This means that you're now using gem based themes. No more _includes, _layouts and _sass folder when you do your jekyll new.
On the other side github pages uses Jekyll 3.1.6 (reference).
So when you pull a site created without _includes, _layouts and _sass folders on github pages, it results in build errors. Your site is not created and you get 404s errors.
If you want to be sure that a site developed locally to work on github pages, you can go with gh-pages gems. See install instructions here.
If you just want to stay with jekyll 3.2 locally and copy themes's files, you can have a look at this answer.

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.