This is my first guide on Jekyll! Please comment on if you see misinformation.

What is Jekyll?

Jekyll is a static site generator made in Ruby. It commonly uses:

  • Markdown for pages and posts

  • Liquid for themes and templating

  • Ruby and Bundler for dependency management, and Jekyll itself

Requirements & recommendations

1. Tools

Required

  • Ruby, 3.1 is minimum, 3.4 recommended for current* version

  • Reading skill for reading the documentation, RTFM is good, yes

  • Liquid familiarity, which is not going to hurt your brain that much but it’s gonna be clunky for YOU

  • HTML, Markdown, YAML and Gemfile skills, which is too EZ

  • LLM agent, can be used to assist with making your own theme, saves your sanity

  • Helper scripts, you can find them on my website’s repository or any other source, because yes

  • Your brain, obviously

2. Hosting

  • GitHub Pages, Jekyll is served via Actions, basically the most reliable

  • Cloudflare Pages, faster in site speed, but you’re gonna wait for it to compile Ruby then install Jekyll and the dependecies, which will take way WAY longer than GitHub pages

  • A home server, well don’t get your hopes up when a power outage happens

  • A VPS from a reliable provider, just don’t get your credit card’s balance to 0$

3. Domains

You can either use a domain you bought or subdomain you have. That’s all, if you’re unsure:

  • Just get from a provider that works, or even better: bring your own DNS nameservers domains.

Tips, tricks & notes

You should start reading the documentation, and follow along it. But do not blindly copy everything since you could cause issues with your source code.