Setting up this site

22 Jan 2014 tutorial, hosting, and jekyll

For most of my projects I use Git as source control and store them on GitHub. They offer a service called Github Pages where you can host static pages. There you have a static page generator tool called Jekyll out of the box witch takes care of the most boring parts and a CDN in front for better hosting performance. You can do this a number of ways and here here is one.

Get started

  1. Get an account on GitHub.

  2. Create a new repository called username.github.io. Don’t forget to replace username with your own GitHub username in all of the examples.

  3. Open up the terminal

$ gem install jekyll
# Installs jekyll
$ jekyll new username.github.io
# Generates boilerplate
$ cd username.github.io
$ git init
# Sets up the Git files
$ git add -A
$ git commit -m 'first commit'
$ git remote add origin https://github.com/username/username.github.io.git
# Pointing it at your GitHub repository
$ git push origin master
# Sends your changes to GitHub
  1. Go to http://username.github.io/ and take a look at the result.

Configuration

Edit _config.yml file to your own liking. Check Jekyll Configuration to see what is avalible.

Local preview

Go to the root of your project and run

$ jekyll server --watch
Configuration file: /project/_config.yml
            Source: /project
       Destination: /project/_site
      Generating...
                    done.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/project'
Configuration file: /project/_config.yml
    Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000/
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

Go to http://127.0.0.1:4000/ to preview your changes.