Setup a Blog in Two Minutes with Jekyll, Docker, Github Pages and Poole

12 Feb 2022

Having previously created this site using Clojure and Cryogen, I wanted to remove the bother of having to host the site myself and to make updates as easy as possible. Github Pages addresses both of these concerns by both hosting the static content and allowing updates to be built and pushed from a Github repository.

Initially I wanted to setup Jekyll locally on linux via installing the gem, however I was not successful due to missing dependencies. Instead of battling with the gem installation, the following was the quickest path for me to get a site deployed.

Repository Creation

Poole is the repository I chose to use as a basis for my Jekyll site as it provides many sensible defaults. In Github, create a fork of the poole repository and name it your-github-user-name-here.github.io (mickrideout.github.io repository in my case)

Enter your new repository and click on the Actions tab at the top. The will show you when Github has finished building your Jekyll site. Once the repository has built successfully, your new site will be available at https://your-github-user-name-here.github.io (eg mickrideout.github.io)

Local Server

Now that you have a Github Pages site, you may want to modify it and run a local server to see that your changes are good before publishing the site. To do this I used a docker version of Jekyll

Firstly, clone your Github Pages repository. Then do a docker pull for Jekyll

docker pull jekyll/jekyll

From the root directory of your repository, run the Jekyll server

docker run --rm \
  --volume="$PWD:/srv/jekyll" \
  --publish [::1]:4000:4000 \
  jekyll/jekyll \
  jekyll serve

You can now view your site at http://localhost:4000

Jekyll will detect page saves and reload the content. All that’s left to do now is to mould the site in your own image.