Jekyll is a static site generator, written in Ruby, that allows you to create sites like this blog using Markdown language. When deciding how to create a new blog, I had different alternatives (wordpress, medium…) but I decided to use Jekyll for several reasons:
- Use Markdown to write posts. I already use it to take personal notes, so it will be easier to transform some of them on new posts.
- As GitHub uses it as the system behind GitHub Pages, I can have a hosted site for free.
- Good excuse to learn Ruby if needed.
Although thanks to Docker, its not even necessary to install Ruby to create a site with Jekyll. There are some good guides about Jekyll, so I will just summarize what I did:
- Find a theme. I selected one called chirpy.
- Fork the theme repository, and rename it to ‘alb3rtobr.github.io’.
- Personalize the theme modifying
_config.yml. - Write this first post :)
Using the official Jekyll Docker image it is possible to build the site locally before committing any change to the repo.
First, to build the site (this step is only needed for creating the site locally):
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$ docker run --rm --volume="$PWD:/srv/jekyll" -it jekyll/jekyll:3.8 jekyll build
And after that, to serve the site:
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$ docker run --volume="$PWD:/srv/jekyll" -p 3000:4000 -it jekyll/jekyll:3.8 jekyll serve --watch --drafts
Running this command the site will be available at localhost:3000.