So I am using Jekyll Bootstrap, which is also available on GitHub, in order to build my blog (which is currently just full of filler content for development). One thing I noticed is that when running my local development server using the command
$ jekyll --server --auto
I am able to edit my markdown content and have it auto regenerate the local site while I am changing things. As far as I can tell this does not work for my CSS or for my templates. I also noticed that when I run the local server with the --auto flag Jekyll creates a directory called auto which stores what appears to be a static copy of my site's content. Jekyll-bootstrap comes with it's own .gitignore file set up for you which I assumed contained the auto directory. I see no reason to store this auto-regenerated content in the GitHub repository for my site, however, when I made a commit I noticed it added the entire auto directory. I opened up the .gitignore file and this is what it contains:
_site/*
_theme_packages/*
Thumbs.db
.DS_Store
!.gitkeep
.rbenv-version
.rvmrc
I am very new to Jekyll and Jekyll Bootstrap, and a little new to git. I am not sure if there is a reason why they wouldn't have an entry to ignore the auto directory. I was figuring I should add an entry for auto/*. Is there a reason I shouldn't do this? As far as I can tell there is no use for the auto directory for anyone that either downloading the site from the web or from its git repository?
You can put it in your gitignore file. When deploying your site, you'll generally build it into the _site directory and publish it somewhere (your own VPS, GitHub pages, etc).
Related
I'm a total newbie when it comes to Jekyll, and have encountered a big problem. I'm probably doing something wrong or missing something, but what?
I find it very confusing trying to install the "Agency Jekyll Theme" which is the first theme I'm trying out. Mostly because there are several ways to do it, the commands don't add up and there is a lot of "you can do this" embedded into what you actually have to do to install it.
These are the guides I've been following:
https://jekyllrb.com/docs/step-by-step/01-setup/
https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/jekyll-agency/1.2.0
http://jekyllthemes.org/themes/agency/
Basically, I've tried all the 3 possible ways to install it without success.
I'm running on Windows.
My problem:
jekyll serve (ran in my site folder) creates a _site folder and content in the subfolders css, img and js. Nothing else is created, not index.html, and other files needed directly under _site folder.
In my site root folder, there are only _config.yml and Gemfile, after completing the initial steps.
There seems to be a problem with actually downloading the full theme into my root folder. When I manually download the agency-jekyll-theme-starter-master.zip and extract the entire content in my root site folder, there is index.html, _data folder, etc. However, in the assets folder, there is only an img folder.
As a result, when I open http://localhost:4000/agency-jekyll-theme-starter/ in a browser there is only a directory listing with the folder "assets".
Where do the css folder and its content come from that generates under _site?
My workaround:
I run jekyll build so that the site in its entirety is placed under _site folder. However, with this process, the whole point of using Jekyll is lost because I have to edit the generated HTML files, CSS files, etc. To change simple stuff like renaming the page/navigation "Services" to another word I have to go through the HTML file and replace all occurrences
My successful attempt to reproduce your issue:
I tried this method from http://jekyllthemes.org/themes/agency/
Using the Starter Template
This is the fastest and easiest way to get up and running on GitHub Pages. Simply generate your own repository by clicking here, then replace the sample content with your own and configure for your needs.
The starter template (that is also linked on the page above) allowed me to start a code space and commit the repo content into my new branch.
I could reproduce your problem, there were no styles when running jekyll serve.
The reason for the issue:
The problem is the baseurl in the _config.yml file. It points to a relative path that does not exist in your repository. Your baseurl / path is "", because you run your server from the root folder, most probably both locally and later remotely using GitHub pages.
The solution for the issue:
In the _config.yml file in your repo, change this one line
from
baseurl: "/agency-jekyll-theme-starter" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
to
baseurl: "" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
Check out https://github.com/cadamini/jekyll-agency-test if you like.
I hope this was understandable and helpful and that you can solve your issue with these instructions. Don't hesitate to comment for further clarification.
i have a mixed situation where i have my custom website generated in a _dev folder, and i want jekyll generated blog files to go in that same folder. of course i don't want jekyll to wipe up any of the files that are already there, but just to wipe up and rebuild the jekyll related files.
i don't want to list all the things i want to keep like this:
keep_files: [js,css,images,*.html]
plus the *.html, while building, throws an error. is there a way to tell jekyll to just wipe up and rebuild the jekyll related files only?
i can't find many options on this on the official documentation.
i'm on jekyll 3.4.3
By default Jekyll deletes the output folder before building the site. Unless you change that behaviour in source code you can build your website in a temporal folder and copy the contents replacing the old files in your website folder.
jekyll build --destination /tmp/jk
cp -r /tmp/jk/* _dev/
This way it will only replace the Jekyll related files.
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
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.
I'm considering Jekyll for a site I'm putting together that will be a blog with lots of images (and other larg-ish media files). It's easy enough to to make a directory for images and then link to them as needed in the posts. But, as I understand it, when the site is generated, all the image data will be duplicated into the generated _site directory that holds the static files. Each time the site is generated the _site directory is emptied, and repopulated with the static version of the site.
Is there any way to, for example, drop a symlink to the images directory inside the site directory, and then maybe have jekyll ignore it when the static files are generated?
Or is there another way to go about this that makes more sense?
Assuming you are running on an apache web server, you can setup an Alias directive to serve images from a directory outside of the normal docroot. You need access to edit the VirtualHosts config or some other ability to create aliases directives (e.g. via a control panel).
For an example of how this would work, let's say you are storing your jekyll files under a directory called "/web/jekyll". To get your images directory do the following:
Add an "_images" directory along with your basic jekyll tree. Ending up with something like:
_config.yml
_images/
_layouts/
_posts/
_site/
index.md
Update your apache config to add the Alias directive like:
Alias /images /web/jekyll/_images
Reload the apache config and run jekyll to build the site.
Since the image directory name starts with an underscore, jekyll won't push/copy it to the output _site during the build. Apache will happily serve most files from your _site directory as normal, but when it sees something like "http://jekyll/images/test.jpg", instead of looking for the file under "/web/jekyll/_site/_images/test.jpg", it'll serve it from "/web/jekyll/_images/test.jpg".
Incidentally, I like a little more separation of the source content and output content than jekyll defaults to. So, I setup my directory structure as follows:
/web/jekyll/html/
/web/jekyll/images/
/web/jekyll/source/
/web/jekyll/source/_config.yml
/web/jekyll/source/_layouts
/web/jekyll/source/_posts
/web/jekyll/source/index.md
With the following option set in _config.yml
destination: ../html
And the apache alias directive setup with:
Alias /images /web/jekyll/images
Jekyll is run in the "/web/jekyll/source" directory, but output is sent to the "/web/jekyll/html" dir. Similar to the first example, calls to "http://jekyll/images/test.jpg" are served from "/web/jekyll/images/test.jpg". This setup doesn't really make a difference from a site serving perspective. I just like the cleaner separation between the raw source files, the fully baked output files and the images which work via the alias.
Correct, the first part of the jekyll command removes everything in the destination directory. The problem with that is the symlinks must be manually created again. So next, go ahead and create a script that does this each time.
Be sure that:
exclude: [jekyll, css, img] in the _config.yml file
linux: The ";" symbol runs first, second, third.. commands.
script: A file named jekyll with executable permissions containing
jekyll;
ln -s /var/www/css /var/www/_site/css;
ln -s /var/www/img /var/www/_site/img;
Finally run (./jekyll) that program instead of jekyll.
-Dan
Make a project page for the images.
Set up directory structure
/home/git/svnpenn.github.io
/home/git/img
Run Jekyll
# We cant add the symlink until after jekyll is done. We will remove the
# site folder and wait for it to rebuild.
rm -r _site
jekyll --server &
while [ ! -f _site/index.html ]
do
sleep 1
done
ln -s ../images _site/images
Note I was using this because I thought it would help publish time on GitHub
pages. It does not. GitHub can take 1-10 minutes to publish depending on the
server.
I know this has already been answered, but I went a slightly different route. I hosted all of my images in a public directory on Dropbox and use grunt to generate a manifest of the images. It keeps my repository small because the images don't get checked in. I detailed it a while back in a blog post.