How to use Jekyll with GitHub

You've probably noticed that I didn't write any posts the last few weeks. The reason is that I've migrated my WordPress Blog to Jekyll. This means it takes some source files and generates purely static pages from that. The generation process is independant of user requests.

Jekyll is a static blog generator, just like Pelican, Hyde, nanoc and Octopress.

I've spend about 40-80 hours to migrate from WordPress to Jekyll. And I'm not done jet.

Jekyll compared with WordPress

Jekyll is a static site generator. This means you have the source files on your computer. Then you generate the website with Jekyll and upload only the generated files. So you only push content to the server, but you don't have to download anything from the server.

Reasons for Jekyll:

  • Security: With Jekyll, you only upload static files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Images, ...). There is nothing where the user can pass some data. This also means there is one thing less to update.
    Assuming your provider updates your server software (e.g. Apache) you don't have to update anything. In contrast, when you don't regularly install updates on your WordPress blog (and hope that those updates don't break anything), your blog is quite likely to be hacked.
  • Speed: The webserver needs only to serve the sites. Nothing else. Of course, when you use caching with PHP you might get into a similar situation with WordPress. But it will never be faster.
  • Hosting: You only need webspace. This reduces hosting cost significantly. Additionally, you can use Amazon S3 for hosting!
  • Backups: Creating security backups is VERY easy with Jekyll. Every tool that can make bakups of files can backup your Jekyll blog. No need to worry about databases. If a file is corrupt, only that file is affected. No worries about maximum execution time for importing / exporting backups. No need to get SSH access. Simple FTP access does the job.

Reasons for WordPress:

  • Comments: There is no way to get comments only with static pages. So you need something else, e.g. disqus.
  • Search: Could probably be done with JavaScript, but I guess it is difficult.
  • Editor: WordPress gives you a WYSIWYG editor. I don't know if there is something similar for Jekyll.
  • Compile time: Compilation time is very long for Jekyll. For my blog, it needs over 6 minutes. As I test the result quite often before I publish posts, this is very annoying.
  • Tagging, Category pages, Author pages: Currently, Jekyll lacks basic support for blogging. You don't have tag pages per default, the plugins that provide tags don't have paginated tag index pages. The same problem occurs when it comes to categories or authors.
  • Timed posts: I did not use timed posts very often, but it is very easy to create them with WordPress. With Jekyll, on the other hand, you have to know how to create cronjobs. And your computer has to be running.

Install Jekyll

On an Ubunty system I need for this blog:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-dev imagemagick ruby-rmagick libmagickwand-dev ruby-execjs ruby-nokogiri
$ sudo gem install jekyll
$ sudo gem install dimensions
$ sudo gem install fileutils
$ sudo mkdir -p /var/www/blog

GitHub

Create your repository

  1. Go to github.com, sign in and create a new repo:
  2. Call it [Username].github.io.

Branches

The way to use Jekyll with GitHub is by using branches. Go to your Git repository that cointains your blog:

[email protected] ~/Downloads/MartinThoma.github.io $ ls
_config.yml  favicon.ico  index.html  Makefile  Readme.md
css          images       js          _plugins  _site
_drafts      _includes    _layouts    _posts    thumbs

Now you should create a new branch that will contain your source files. The following command creates a branch sources that starts where the branch master currently is:

git checkout -b source master

Now update this branch to the server:

git push -u origin source

When you enter

git checkout . master

you will switch to the master brach. The same way you can switch to the source branch. After you've entered the command, you can look at the folder in your file system. There will only be the data of the current branch.

Custom Domain

If you want to host your content at GitHub, but have a custom Domain like martin-thoma.com instead of martinthoma.github.io, you have to:

  1. Ask your provider (in my case "Knallhart") to add an A-record to Github.
  2. Add a file called CNAME with content martin-thoma.com (yes, without http://) to the root of your directory

GitHub also offers some help on setting up a custom domain with Pages.

FTP Server

If you have your own FTP server, you probably want to use it.

One tool that might now come to your mind is rsync. But rsync needs SSH (source). If you have SSH, then you can do something like this:

rsync -avz --delete _site/ [email protected]:/path/to/web/root

The --delete options "delete[s] extraneous files from dest dirs", -a means archive which preserves the owner, group, change date and some more of files, -v is verbose as always and -z is for compression while the file transfer happens. --progress might also be interesting, especially for the first upload.

Otherwise, you might want to try curlftpfs. This program lets you mount a FTP folder:

curlftpfs ftp.example.com/backups /mnt/ftpserver

and you can also umount it:

rsync --delete /var/backups /mnt/ftpserver

Markdown

I've switched between rdiscount and redcarpet. The former is faster, the latter supports fenced code blocks. I finally stuck with redcarped, because Liquid has problems when it comes to C++ for loops after curly braces.

Other Markdown parsers are maruku (which has a Multiple lines for HTML <li>-tag issue) and kramdown (which is slow and does not handle fenced code blocks and LaTeX correctly).

Similar to Matthias I would like to share a feature matrix of Markdown parsers included into Jekyll. I have used jekyll 1.4.3 to create the following table. I've used this page to see if fenced code blocks and pygments is working and that page for LaTeX. Everything was tested with this site.

redcarpet rdiscount kramdown maruku
LaTeX ✓ ✓ ✓ ?
Fenced code blocks ✓ ✓ ~ ?
Pygments ✓ ✓ ✓ ?
Site generation 176.90s 165.41s 293.26s ?

Kramdown destroyed some fenced code blocks (but not all) and maruku did not even compile my site at all.

Linebreaks and newline

Linebreaks are an issue. Sometimes I want to get a <br/>, sometimes I make linebreaks to make reading of the text files easier. It's basically this discussion.

Currently, I'm not satisfied with the situation. I never had that problem with WordPress. WordPress simply created paragraphs just at the right location.

Customization

You can create custom Liquid filters, plugins and templates. Everything is quite easy. The Liquid templating language seems to be very similar to Django Templates (Python).

Make the Website super-fast

CSS Minification

sudo gem install juicer
juicer install jslint
juicer install yui_compressor

Images

I've included small images as base64 (used this online tool). According to caniuse it's quite save to use.

Site Search

Site search is a real problem. I've seen three solutions so far:

  1. Dynamic Search: You can add a dynamic part to your statically generated website. For example, I create a search/index.php and a SQLite database like it was described here.
  2. Static JavaScript: Create a JSON file or something similar and search dynamically with JavaScript in it.
  3. External Search Engines: You could use a search engine for searching your site, of course.
  4. Hosted by you:
  5. Commercial * Google Custom Search * Index Den: Has no direct support to parse your website

PHP+SQLite

JavaScript solutions

One JavaScript solution I've found is lunr. This one is really bad as it copies the whole body to a json file. This json file has to be loaded before it works. But my posts total at the moment to 2MB. I'm pretty sure my readers don't want to wait until 2MB are downloaded. So this one does only work for smaller websites.

Christan Fei's solution does only search in the title and category.

Templates

Jekyll uses Liquid as a templating language. It is similar to Django templates. Here is a short introduction to Liquid.

A Sublime Text template is the following:

<snippet>
    <content><![CDATA[
---
layout: post
title: ${1:}
author: Martin Thoma
date: 2014-11-22 17:19
categories:
- ${2:Cyberculture}
tags:
- ${3:Rating}
featured_image: logos/${4:star.png}
---
${5:}
]]></content>
    <!-- Optional: Set a tabTrigger to define how to trigger the snippet -->
    <tabTrigger>---</tabTrigger>
    <!-- Optional: Set a scope to limit where the snippet will trigger -->
    <!-- <scope>source.python</scope> -->
</snippet>

Some tests

I've also used LinkChecker to check if all new links are valid. I've found quite a lot of old links and replaced them with new links.

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