Let's start to use Jekyll

Ok… you might have figured out that this post was actually created automatically when I first initialized the repository. But in the end I would like to keep it to remind myself and you how to use Jekyll as a site generator and GitHub Pages to host the page.

I found some useful info to get started with Jekyll at the following links:

https://jekyllrb.com/docs/home
https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll
https://talk.jekyllrb.com/
https://onextrapixel.com/start-jekyll-blog-github-pages-free/

For to quick-start a site, just type the following in your computer terminal:

gem install bundler jekyll
jekyll new Brain_and_Code
cd Brain_and_Code
bundle exec jekyll serve

The site is generated locally and you can access it in your browser by navigating to:

http://localhost:4000

I wanted the blog to be connected to my already existing GitHub projects, so, for me, Github Pages seemed to be the perfect solution. I followed the instruction on GitHub to integrate my blog with my already existing repository:

https://help.github.com/en/articles/configuring-a-publishing-source-for-github-pages

This enables me to work on my projects and my blog at the same repository but under two separate branches:

https://github.com/NicoleEic/Brain_and_Code/tree/master/
https://github.com/NicoleEic/Brain_and_Code/tree/gh-pages/

Error handling

Port is occupied

If you see in your local command line something like:

jekyll 3.8.5 | Error:  Address already in use - bind(2) for xxx.x.x.x:4000

You need to kill the process that is running in the background manually by determining it’s PID:

$ lsof -wni tcp:4000
COMMAND   PID       USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
ruby    43631      <user>  13u  IPv4 0x3453ebb5e10f92c9      0t0  TCP *:terabase (LISTEN)
$ kill -9 43631
$ jekyll --watch serve
bundle exec jekyll serve

Problem with relative file paths in Github Pages

If your blog is hosted from the gh-pages branch of your repository, issues can arise from the way how relative file paths are generated. In my case, the solution was to change the baseurl and url field in the ‘_config.yml’ file. For the local build these fields should be empty, but for your remote version on Github, it should reference to your repository and the project page, as here in my example:

baseurl: "/Brain_and_Code" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
url: "https://nicoleeic.github.io" # the base hostname & protocol for your site

You should also tell Git on your local system to stop syncing the local and the remote version of the file:

git update-index --assume-unchanged _config.yml