About GitHub Pages and Jekyll

About Jekyll

Jekyll is a static site generator with built-in support for GitHub Pages and a simplified build process. Jekyll takes Markdown and HTML files and creates a complete static website based on your choice of layouts. Jekyll supports Markdown and Liquid, a templating language that loads dynamic content on your site. For more information, see Jekyll.

Jekyll is not officially supported for Windows. For more information, see "Jekyll on Windows" in the Jekyll documentation.

We recommend using Jekyll with GitHub Pages. If you prefer, you can use other static site generators or customize your own build process locally or on another server. For more information, see "About GitHub Pages."

Configuring Jekyll in your GitHub Pages site

You can configure most Jekyll settings, such as your site's theme and plugins, by editing your _config.yml file. For more information, see "Configuration" in the Jekyll documentation.

Some configuration settings cannot be changed for GitHub Pages sites.

lsi: false
safe: true
source: [your repo's top level directory]
incremental: false
highlighter: rouge
gist:
  noscript: false
kramdown:
  math_engine: mathjax
  syntax_highlighter: rouge

By default, Jekyll doesn't build files or folders that:

• are located in a folder called /node_modules or /vendor
• start with _, ., or #
• end with ~
• are excluded by the exclude setting in your configuration file

If you want Jekyll to process any of these files, you can use the include setting in your configuration file.

Front matter

To set variables and metadata, such as a title and layout, for a page or post on your site, you can add YAML front matter to the top of any Markdown or HTML file. For more information, see "Front Matter" in the Jekyll documentation.

You can add site.github to a post or page to add any repository references metadata to your site. For more information, see "Using site.github" in the Jekyll Metadata documentation.

Themes

You can add a Jekyll theme to your GitHub Pages site to customize the look and feel of your site. For more information, see "Themes" in the Jekyll documentation.

You can add a theme to your site manually. For more information, see "Supported themes" on the GitHub Pages site and "Adding a theme to your GitHub Pages site using Jekyll."

You can override any of your theme's defaults by editing the theme's files. For more information, see your theme's documentation and "Overriding your theme's defaults" in the Jekyll documentation.

Plugins

You can download or create Jekyll plugins to extend the functionality of Jekyll for your site. For example, the jemoji plugin lets you use GitHub-flavored emoji in any page on your site the same way you would on GitHub. For more information, see "Plugins" in the Jekyll documentation.

GitHub Pages uses plugins that are enabled by default and cannot be disabled:

• jekyll-coffeescript
• jekyll-default-layout
• jekyll-gist
• jekyll-github-metadata
• jekyll-optional-front-matter
• jekyll-paginate
• jekyll-readme-index
• jekyll-titles-from-headings
• jekyll-relative-links

You can enable additional plugins by adding the plugin's gem to the plugins setting in your _config.yml file. For more information, see "Configuration" in the Jekyll documentation.

For a list of supported plugins, see "Dependency versions" on the GitHub Pages site. For usage information for a specific plugin, see the plugin's documentation.