Basic Usage
The Jekyll gem makes a jekyll executable available to you in your Terminal
window. You can use this command in a number of ways:
$ jekyll build
# => The current folder will be generated into ./_site
$ jekyll build --destination <destination>
# => The current folder will be generated into <destination>
$ jekyll build --source <source> --destination <destination>
# => The <source> folder will be generated into <destination>
$ jekyll build --watch
# => The current folder will be generated into ./_site,
# watched for changes, and regenerated automatically.
Changes to _config.yml are not included during automatic regeneration.
The _config.yml master configuration file contains global configurations
and variable definitions that are read once at execution time. Changes made to _config.yml
during automatic regeneration are not loaded until the next execution.
Note Data Files are included and reloaded during automatic regeneration.
Destination folders are cleaned on site builds
The contents of <destination> are automatically
cleaned, by default, when the site is built. Files or folders that are not
created by your site will be removed. Files and folders you wish to retain
in <destination> may be specified within the <keep_files>
configuration directive.
Do not use an important location for <destination>;
instead, use it as a staging area and copy files from there to your web server.
Jekyll also comes with a built-in development server that will allow you to preview what the generated site will look like in your browser locally.
$ jekyll serve
# => A development server will run at http://localhost:4000/
# Auto-regeneration: enabled. Use `--no-watch` to disable.
$ jekyll serve --detach
# => Same as `jekyll serve` but will detach from the current terminal.
# If you need to kill the server, you can `kill -9 1234` where "1234" is the PID.
# If you cannot find the PID, then do, `ps aux | grep jekyll` and kill the instance.
Be aware of default behavior
As of version 2.4, the serve command will watch for changes automatically. To disable this, you can use jekyll serve --no-watch, which preserves the old behavior.
$ jekyll serve --no-watch
# => Same as `jekyll serve` but will not watch for changes.
These are just a few of the available configuration options.
Many configuration options can either be specified as flags on the command line,
or alternatively (and more commonly) they can be specified in a _config.yml
file at the root of the source directory. Jekyll will automatically use the
options from this file when run. For example, if you place the following lines
in your _config.yml file:
source: _source
destination: _deploy
Then the following two commands will be equivalent:
$ jekyll build
$ jekyll build --source _source --destination _deploy
For more about the possible configuration options, see the configuration page.
Call for help
The help command is always here to remind you of all available options and usage, and also works with the build, serve and new subcommands, e.g jekyll help new or jekyll help build.
If you’re interested in browsing these docs on-the-go, install the
jekyll-docs gem and run jekyll docs in your terminal.