For a long time I wanted to make my own website. I tried a lot of content management systems, but all of them I thought more work than it was worth. So with each of those applications I quit before I finished a single decent webpage. A few months ago I encountered Jekyll for the first time, but didn’t pay it much attention. It looked nice and you could publish webpages using markdown files.

Jekyll

I write all my notes in markdown style, something I got used to because I often share it with others or paste it in Slack. Now I lost a couple of times my notes, because I didn’t save it on secure locations and my laptop got a new installation, so I decided to commit them to github. Nice and easy, right? But when you when I got a lot of files, I missed a menu to select the different notes.

Jekyll as static site generator is powerful but simple!

Github pages

Next thing I wanted was to host it. And even this is easy with Jekyll. The answer is Github pages. The only thing you have to do is deploy your Jekyll project to a repository with the name [username].github.io, and you it will be served on that address. You can also serve it on your own domain or a subfolder of the [username].github.io domain. But this was the best fit for me.

Github pages for hosting your own site

Setup a Jekyll site

When I wanted to start my Jekyll project, I found out, I had to install a lot of tools, a full Ruby environment, Jekyll and Bundler. I decided a long time ago, I’ll try to keep my development environment as clean as possible, with as few tools as possible. Installing a full Ruby environment as a non-ruby developer was not something I looked forward to. Luckily I found a solution in Docker. There is a Docker image available for Jekyll environments. With this image I could setup a new Jekyll project (command: jekyll new .), build my project (command: jekyll build) and serve it locally (command: jekyll serve). The only thing for this is to mount my Jekyll project directory to /srv/jekyll. The Docker-compose file I made for can be found in my Github project.

No unnecessary tools needed for building Jekyll, when you use Docker!

Currently I slowly build my Jekyll website, by adding Bootstrap 4, Font Awesome, custom templates and change the design so that it will turn, form a plain Jekyll site, to my own website created with Jekyll.