Setup Jekyll with GitHub Pages

As my first blog post, I feel like I should describe how I deployed this blog. Basically, I used Jekyll to create a static website and deployed it to GitHub Pages.

Jekyll

Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware static site generator that takes text written in Markdown, Liquid, HTML, or other formats and generates a static website ready to be hosted on a web server. It is the engine behind GitHub Pages and is widely used by developers for creating blogs, personal websites, and project documentation.

Initially, I wanted to use something like React, however, that seemed way too overkill for the relatively simple demand that I had, compared to Jekyll to write blogs is super easy.

Prerequisites

Before we dive into the deployment process, make sure you have the following prerequisites in place:

1. GitHub Account

Log in to your GitHub account and create a new repository with name yourusername.github.io

2. Install RubyGems

Install RubyGems on your local computer, for Ubuntu, use APT to install:

sudo apt install ruby-rubygems

3.1 Create New Jekyll Project

If you want to create a fresh new Jekyll project, first install jekyll:

gem install bundler jekyll

Then create a new jekyll project

jekyll new my-website

configure the _config.yml file and add dependencies to Gemfile as you see fit. Then test it locally using:

bundle exec jekyll serve

3.2 Use Jekyll Template

For me, I basically used a Jekyll template online, namely the Chirpy template.

1. Fork the repo, then rename the repo to yourusername.github.io.
2. Usually the template has Author Name, Project URL, etc. configured in places like _config.yml and _data/.
3. Consider changing the favicon.

4. Deploy to GitHub

If your project doesn’t have a pages-deploy under .github file, you can manually configure the repo to build and deploy.

1. Commit your code to the GitHub repo, then visit your GitHub repository’s Settings page.

2. Go to the “GitHub Pages” section. Under “Source,” select “main branch” and click “Save.”

3. You should see a GitHub action in tab “Actions”, after it finished deploying, the page shoulde be live at https://yourusername.github.io/.

   

NixOS Setup Attempt

Despite using bundle and bundix, I still wasn’t able to get Chirpy to run on NixOS. It seems to have something to do with dependency http_parser.rb and the fact that it cannot generate . in gemset.nix.

** Update, after some errors with write errors w/ bundle trying to write to nix store:

Errno::EROFS: Read-only file system

I basically changed the bundle path to user filespace:

bundle config set --local path vendor/bundle

Then I tried running bundle and it worked, running bundle exec jekyll s however gave the following error:

bundler: failed to load command: jekyll (/home/*/bundle_cache/ruby/3.1.0/bin/jekyll)

I tried running ./bundle_cache/ruby/3.1.0/bin/jekyll directly, and it instead said /usr/bin/env: ‘ruby’: No such file or directory, turns out I didn’t install ruby in configuration.nix. Adding that basically fixed everything.