Building a personal blogging site using Jekyll in under 15 minutes

01 Aug 2020

Walk-through for creating this website using a Jekyll theme - Lanyon and hosted on Github pages, using Markdown and Docker for local hosting.

Step 1: Clone Lanyon Repo

// Clone the Lanyon Repo

git clone https://github.com/poole/lanyon.git

// Flush git info

rm -rfv lanyon/.git

// Rename the path to whatever you want to call your github repository

mv lanyon mywebsites

Step 2: Create Github repository

Head over to GitHub and create a new repository.

Create New Github Repo

Step 3: Commit to Github

Let’s do an initial commit to our new repo.

git init
git add .
git commit -am 'initial commit'

// Add your repo below

git remote add origin <your repo>
git push -u origin master

Step 4: Enable GitHub Pages

From your github repo, goto settings and enable github pages. Within a few minutes you will have the URL to your website!

Enable Github Pages

Step 5: Use Docker to serve content locally

To serve your website locally before pushing your changes to github, you may use Docker

For the very first time you will have to do a build:

docker run --env=DEBUG=true --rm --volume="/Users/purak/Desktop/mywebsite:/srv/jekyll" -it jekyll/jekyll:$JEKYLL_VERSION jekyll build

Once the build is complete you can run it with draft mode:

docker run --name mydomain.com --env=DEBUG=true --rm --volume="/Users/purak/Desktop/mywebsite:/srv/jekyll" -p 4000:4000 -it jekyll/jekyll:$JEKYLL_VERSION jekyll serve --watch --drafts

Your website should now be hosted locally at: http://localhost:4000

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