Easily and Quickly set up Jekyll in a Windows environment!

Setup:

1. Clone this github repository: apdekock/jekyllWindows

2. Run cmd.bat which will set up the relative paths and provide a console with jekyll instructions.

Generate:

Quick-start Instructions for jekyll:
	1. jekyll new my-awesome-site
	2. replace the config in my-awesome-site\_config.yml with 
	   the [relative path]_config.yml one.
	3. cd my-awesome-site
	4. jekyll serve
Now browse to http://localhost:4000

Click-able link to see the site below http://localhost:4000.

Creating a simple blog

I wanted to create a simple blog and did some investigation. I stumbled onto Jekyll which comes highly recommended.

I found an awesome step-by-step guide by Julian Thilo http://jekyll-windows.juthilo.com/ which allowed me to get set up. It’s a bit of a mission though to set up in a Windows environment.

Switching between laptops or reloading the OS and replicating these steps over and over seem excessive so I took it upon myself to create a plug-and-play version of the jekyll environment.

What is Jekyll?

Jekyll is a simple, user friendly static site generator powered by Ruby, and is also the engine behind GitHub Pages. It takes a template directory containing raw text files, runs it through Markdown (Liquid or Textile) converters, and generates a complete ready-to-publish static website. - http://mashable.com/2014/08/28/static-website-generators/

For more information check out the Jekyll Github repo.

What is GitHub pages?

Websites for you and your projects. - https://pages.github.com/

This blog is hosted in Github pages.

Instructions for using Jekyll with GitHub Pages

Not so vanilla

I needed to disable the highlighter in the _config.yml to get it working locally. I could enable it when pushing to GitHub pages.

For syntax highlighting I installed rouge locally, that is the reason for step [2] in the “Quick-start Instructions for jekyll” which replaces the vanilla _config.yml with one that uses the appropriate highlighter setting.

Works both locally and on GitHub pages but obviously no syntax highlighting:

highlighter: none

Works locally after “jekyll install rouge”:

highlighter: rouge

Works on GitHub pages:

highlighter: pygments

Complete _config.yml:

# Site settings
title: Your awesome title
email: [email protected]
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: "" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog/
url: "http://yourdomain.com" # the base hostname & protocol for your site
twitter_username: jekyllrb
github_username:  jekyll
highlighter: rouge
# Build settings
markdown: kramdown

Versions

Granted, the versions in the apdekock/jekyllWindows repo are not the most recent. However, they are fit for purpose as they are compatible with GitHub pages, as well as with my environment.

Moral:

• “Why do I have to watch a French movie, I didn’t do anything wrong.” — Phil Dunphy

  Don’t punish yourself, clone the repo.