Jekyll, Chirpy and the Github Pages

Github Pages lets you host Jekyll sites and Chirpy makes it even easier.

Photo by Florian Bernhardt on Unsplash

Prerequisites

Make sure to have Ruby installed.

On Mac: moncefbelyamani’s tutorial.

On Windows https://rubyinstaller.org/

Steps

1. Create a new repository from the Chirpy Starter and name it <GH_USERNAME>.github.io if you want to host with Github Pages at https://<GH_USERNAME>.github.io.

   If you want to host at https://<GH_USERNAME>.github.io/<REPO_NAME>, then just name the repo whatever you want.

2. Cloned the repo locally. Installed dependencies with command bundle from both windows and mac.
3. Also ran:

   bundle lock --add-platform x86_64-linux
   

4. In _config.yml,
   • updated baseurl to <REPO_NAME>
   • updated url to https://<GH_USERNAME>.github.io
5. Then pushed to main branch. That triggered the /.github/workflows/pages-deploy.yml and the branch gh-pages on github was automatically created and site build was also successful.
6. Then went to repository on GitHub > Settings > Pages and as Source, chose gh-pages as the branch and /(root) as the root folder. Shortly afterwards, the site became accessible.

Launch locally

bundle exec jekyll serve

Custom domain

GitHub Pages can be configured with a custom domain. GitHub’s documentations are pretty comprehensive and easy to follow, but let’s go over some of the key steps that GitHub will make you perform in order to configure a custom domain.

1. Verify domain: GitHub will want to know that you really own the custom domain that you claim to own. This is accomplished by GH providing you with a TXT record details that you must create on your DNS provider.
2. Add domain to repo in GH: On your GH repository page, go to “Settings” > “Code and automation” > “Pages” > “Custom domain”, type your custom domain, then click Save. Since I was publishing my site from a branch, this created a commit that added a CNAME file directly to the root of my source branch (gh-pages).
3. Create A records on your DNS provider: Time to create some A records on your DNS provider. These A records will point your apex custom domain (YOURDOMAIN.COM) to GitHub Pages server IP addresses. Be sure to delete any existing A records that might point to some other IP addresses. Check if it worked:

   dig YOURDOMAIN.COM +noall +answer -t A
   

4. Redirect subdomain: You can redirect a subdomain like www by creating a CNAME record on your DNS provider so that the subdomain points to <GH_USERNAME>.github.io. Check if it worked:

   dig WWW.YOURDOMAIN.COM +nostats +nocomments +nocmd
   

   If you want to host directly at https://YOURDOMAIN.COM, then no need to rename the repo to <GH_USERNAME>.github.io. Only in _config.yml, set baseurl to ''.