Creating a Jekyll-powered website

Reviewed on 03 June 2024 • Published on 12 July 2018

cms
Jekyll

Jekyll is a powerful tool built with Ruby, designed to convert MarkDown files into static websites. Unlike server-side languages such as PHP, which generates a new page for each visitor, Jekyll takes a different approach. It transforms your MarkDown content into static HTML files, minimizing RAM and CPU usage. This method ensures that your web pages are pre-generated, providing a faster and resource-friendly solution.

In this guide, we’ll dive into how Jekyll simplifies the process of creating static websites, offering a more streamlined and performance-conscious alternative.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

A Scaleway account logged into the console
Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
An SSH key
Two Instances running on Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish (22.04 LTS), one for the development platform and the other to run the site in production

Installing Jekyll on the development server

Start with the installation of our development platform.

Install ruby, make, tree, and the build-essential package.

apt install ruby ruby-dev make build-essential tree git-core

Create a user to run Jekyll and switch to the account of the user.

adduser jekyll
su jekyll

Edit the .bashrc file to provide the gem package manager the information to place the Gems in the user’s PATH, to avoid conflicts with system-wide installations.

Open the file and add the following lines at the end of the file.

# Ruby exports
export GEM_HOME=$HOME/gems
export PATH=$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH

Save the file, close your text editor, and activate the exports.

source .bashrc

Once this is done, install Jekyll via gem, together with bundler, which manages Gem dependencies.

gem install jekyll bundler

Create a new site by using jekyll new command. The new site will be named www. Specify it behind the command and run it as the following:

jekyll new www

The command will generate the following files, enter the www directory by typing cd www.

Use tree to get a listing of the files generated by Jekyll:

    .
    ├── 404.html
    ├── about.md
    ├── _config.yml
    ├── Gemfile
    ├── Gemfile.lock
    ├── index.md
    └── _posts
        └── 2018-04-16-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown

These files are not the actual files of your website, but the data used by Jekyll to generate your site.

Installing Git on the Production server

Jekyll provides a basic web server for testing during development, but its main purpose is to build static HTML files that can be served by a web server.

We use Nginx in our example on the production server.

Start by installing the required software:

sudo apt-get install ruby ruby-dev nginx make build-essential git-core

Run Git on the production server, therefore you have to create a user called git:

sudo adduser git

Answer the questionnaire and set a password for the user.

Now prepare the web root for the site. Start by removing the default index.html file generated by Ubuntu:

sudo rm /var/www/html/index.nginx-debian.html

Set the ownership of the web directory, so git can update it:

sudo chown git:www-data /var/www/html

su git
mkdir -p /home/git/scaleway-web.git
cd /home/git/scaleway-web.git
git init --bare

If the operation is successful, you’ll see the following output:

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/git/scaleway-web.git/

To launch the automatic regeneration of our site once we have pushed updates to Git, use Git Hooks.

These are scripts that are used by Git to trigger actions at certain points in Git’s execution.

Git stores these scripts in the directory hooks and we will use the post-receive hook to regenerate our site when we push it to Git.

Create the file post-receive in the hooks directory and put the following content in it:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
GIT_REPO=$HOME/scaleway-blog.git
TMP_DIRECTORY=/tmp/scaleway-blog
PUBLIC_WWW=/var/www/html
git clone $GIT_REPO $TMP_DIRECTORY
pushd $TMP_DIRECTORY
bundle exec jekyll build -d $PUBLIC_WWW
popd
rm -rf $TMP_GIT_CLONE
exit

Make the file executable:

chmod +x /home/git/scaleway-blog/hooks/post-receive

Installing Jekyll on the production server

To build the site, you also need an installation of Jekyll on the production server.

On this server, Jekyll will run under our git user.

As on the development instance, edit the .bashrc file to provide the gem package manager the information to place the Gem’s in the user’s PATH to avoid conflicts with system-wide installations.

Open the file .bashrc and add the following lines at the end of the file:

# Ruby exports
export GEM_HOME=$HOME/gems
export PATH=$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH

Save the file, close your text editor, and activate the exports:

source .bashrc

Continue with the installation of Jekyll on the production server:

gem install jekyll bundler jekyll-feed jekyll-seo-tag minima

Creating an SSH key for data transfer

To push the content from the development system to the production server, running our website, Git uses SSH.

Create an SSH key for our jekyll user so it can push contents to the production server.

Run the following commands on our development server:

ssh-keygen -t rsa
ssh-copy-id git@<production-server-ip>

For security reasons, we configure a non-interactive shell, disabling access to the server’s console via SSH, but allowing the use of git commands to manage existing repositories.

Make sure to run the following commands as git user on the production server.

Start by making a git-shell-commands folder, which is required for git-shell to work properly.

mkdir -p /home/git/git-shell-commands

Create the file no-interactive-login to enable the non-interactive shell, and open it with Nano.

nano /home/git/git-shell-commands/no-interactive-login

Put the following information in the file.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
printf '%s\n' "Welcome $USER. Interactive sessions are disabled for security reasons."
exit 128

Save the file and make it executable.

chmod +x /home/git/git-shell-commands/no-interactive-login

Return to the root account by typing exit.

Configure the user to use the git-shell:

sudo usermod -s $(which git-shell) git

Configuring Git on the development server

To be able to use Git to manage the files between both, development and production Instances, it has to also be installed on the development Instance.

Run the following commands with the jekyll user.

Change into the Jekyll directory (www) and initialize the Git repository.

jekyll@jekyll-dev:~$ cd www/
jekyll@jekyll-dev:~/www$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/jekyll/www/.git/

Add the remote repository.

git remote add origin git@5<production-server-ip>:scaleway-blog.git

Before you push content to the production system, you have to tell Git which files it should push. We want to use all the files in our directory.

git .

Make your first commit. The -m parameter represents the comment for the commit:

jekyll@jekyll-dev:~/www$ git commit -m "Initial commit."

A list of the files that have been modified will appear

[master (root-commit) d9621c8] Initial commit.
8 files changed, 223 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 .gitignore
create mode 100644 404.html
create mode 100644 Gemfile
create mode 100644 Gemfile.lock
create mode 100644 _config.yml
create mode 100644 _posts/2018-05-16-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown
create mode 100644 about.md
create mode 100644 index.md

Push the content to your production server.

git push origin master

An output like the following displays:

Counting objects: 4, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 359 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 4 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: /tmp/scaleway-blog ~/scaleway-blog.git
remote: Configuration file: /tmp/scaleway-blog/_config.yml
remote:             Source: /tmp/scaleway-blog
remote:        Destination: /var/www/html
remote:  Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
remote:       Generating...
remote:                     done in 0.702 seconds.
remote:  Auto-regeneration: disabled. Use --watch to enable.
remote: ~/scaleway-blog.git
[new branch]      master -> master

Running Jekyll locally during development

Jekyll provides a built-in web server so the site can run during development directly on the development server.

Enter the command:

jekyll serve --detach

An output like the following displays:

    Configuration file: /home/jekyll/www/_config.yml
                Source: /home/jekyll/www
          Destination: /home/jekyll/www/_site
    Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
        Generating...
                    done in 1.715 seconds.
    Auto-regeneration: disabled when running server detached.
      Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000/
      Server detached with pid '15424'. Run `pkill -f jekyll' or `kill -9 15424' to stop the server.

Use tree again, to see what happened since Jekyll started.

    .
    ├── 404.html
    ├── about.md
    ├── _config.yml
    ├── Gemfile
    ├── Gemfile.lock
    ├── index.md
    ├── _posts
    │   └── 2018-04-16-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown
    └── _site
        ├── 404.html
        ├── about
        │   └── index.html
        ├── assets
        │   ├── main.css
        │   └── minima-social-icons.svg
        ├── feed.xml
        ├── index.html
        └── jekyll
            └── update
                └── 2018
                    └── 04
                        └── 16
                            └── welcome-to-jekyll.html

Jekyll has generated a folder _site, containing the actual HTML files of the website.

Configuring your website

Jekyll uses different configuration files to generate the static content of the site automatically.

A file _config.yml is available in the main directory. By default its minimum content should look like this:

# Site settings
title: Your awesome title
email: your-email@example.com
description: >- # this means to ignore newlines until "baseurl:"
Write an awesome description for your new site here. You can edit this
line in _config.yml. It will appear in your document head meta (for
Google search results) and in your feed.xml site description.
baseurl: "/blog" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
url: "http://myblog.com" # the base hostname & protocol for your site, e.g. http://example.com
twitter_username: jekyllrb
github_username:  jekyll
# Build settings
markdown: kramdown
theme: minima
plugins:
- jekyll-feed
# Exclude from processing.
# The following items will not be processed, by default. Create a custom list
# to override the default setting.
# exclude:
#   - Gemfile
#   - Gemfile.lock
#   - node_modules
#   - vendor/bundle/
#   - vendor/cache/
#   - vendor/gems/
#   - vendor/ruby/

It is possible to edit it to your requirements.

To customize the layout of the pages, it is possible to build a template by creating the following directories and files:

Front Matter:

Jeykyll will interpret all files starting with a YAML front matter as a special file. The front matter must be the first thing in a file, and it must take the form of a valid YAML set between triple-dashed lines. Here is a very basic example:

  ---
  layout: post
  title: Managing site content with Jekyll
  ---

The _includes directory contains all elements of the site that are being used on each page. It is composed of:

footer.html - The footer of each package.

<footer>
  <p>Hosted at <a href="https://scaleway.com">Scaleway</a></p>
  <p>
    {% if site.github_username %} {% include icon-github.html
    username=site.github_username %} {% endif %} {% if site.twitter_username %}
    {% include icon-twitter.html username=site.twitter_username %} {% endif %}
  </p>
</footer>

head.html - All HEAD metadata.

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
  <title>
    {% if page.title %} {{ page.title }} {% else %} {{ site.title }} {% endif %}
  </title>
  <meta name="description" content="{{ site.description }}" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
</head>

header.html - The navigation and header of your website.

<aside>
  <div class="container">
    <nav>
      <ul>
        {% for page in site.pages %} {% if page.title %}
        <li>
          <a href="{{ page.url | prepend: site.baseurl }}">{{ page.title }}</a>
        </li>
        {% endif %} {% endfor %}
        <li><a href='{{ "/blog" | prepend: site.baseurl }}'>Blog</a></li>
      </ul>
    </nav>
  </div>
</aside>
<header>
  <h1><a href="{{ site.baseurl }}">{{ site.title }}</a></h1>
</header>

The _layouts directory may contain the following files:

default.html - The default layout of your website.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  {% include head.html %}
  <body>
    {% include header.html %}
    <main>
      <article>{{ content }}</article>
      {% include footer.html %}
    </main>
  </body>
</html>

page.html

## layout: default
<h2>{{ page.title }}</h2>
{{ content }}

post.html

## layout: default
<h2>{{ page.title }}</h2>
<time
  >{{ page.date | date: "%b %-d, %Y" }}{% if page.author %} • {{ page.author
  }}{% endif %}{% if page.meta %} • {{ page.meta }}{% endif %}</time
>
{{ content }}

Creating the blog

Create a separate directory for your blog. In this tutorial, we call it blog.

Enter the following file in the directory:

index.html with the following content:

## layout: default
<h4>blog</h4>
{% for post in site.posts %}
<time>{{ post.date | date: "%b %-d, %Y" }}</time>
<h3><a href="{{ post.url | prepend: site.baseurl }}">{{ post.title }}</a></h3>
{% endfor %}
<p>subscribe <a href="{{ "/feed.xml" | prepend: site.baseurl }}">via RSS</a></p>

Create a css folder, which should contain only one file:

main.scss with the following contents:

--- # Layout files to import. --- @import "base", "layout",
"syntax-highlighting"

Create a _sass folder, which should also be empty. It will contain your style elements:

_base.scss - which contains all variables, mixins, and resets
_syntax-highlighting.scss - Which can contain the information about the syntax highlighting for different languages
_layout.scss - The layout information for your website

The assets folder contains all static assets such as images, that you could want to use on your website.

All the content of the website is located in the _posts directory. To create a new blog post, create a new file in the format YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.markdown.

Jekyll uses the Liquid templating language to process templates. So you can place different variables in your files that will be replaced automatically with different contents.

More information on the directory structure of Jeykill is available directly in their documentation.

In this tutorial, you have installed a Jekyll development Instance to deploy your website and run it locally on this machine for testing purposes. You have also set up Git to push the website to a production server and generate it automatically with Jekyll, before it is finally served to our users by Nginx. To learn more about Jekyll, read the official documentation.