I have long been a fan of the static website generator Jekyll. It is a splendid project, fast and efficient, and I cannot count the number of sites I have built with it.
Still, I realized that I was doing the same thing over and over again for every new Jekyll project. It was way past time to create myself a tiny boilerplate. Which I did. Say hi to jekyll-boilerplate.
What’s in there?
The goal behind this project was to speed up the beginning of projects using Jekyll. Meanwhile, I wanted not to be too opinionated to avoid finding myself in the exact same situation at the other end of the spectrum; and also so that other people could use this starter pack without having to change much.
I feel like I have done a pretty decent job covering what jekyll-boilerplate does in the project’s README, so feel free to have a look at it to know what’s up. In case you’re lazy, here’s a sum up:
- All the initial set up has been wiped out (example article and page, extra layouts, partials, initial styles, etc.) to start fresh and clean.
- All the assets (images, stylesheets, scripts, etc.) are gathered in a
assetsfolder rather than being spreaded in their individual folders at the root of the project. - The initial configuration has been cleaned up to remove unnecessary options, and provide some default interesting ones (Markdown, Sass, etc.).
- Two gems have been introduced to automate the generation of an Atom feed (
jekyll-feed) and a sitemap (jekyll-sitemap); both running in safe mode to stay compatible with GitHub Pages. - Some improvements have been performed in order to improve accessibility (use of
mainelement, presence of alangattribute…).
How to use it?
As of today, this is mostly a personal helper so I did not distribute jekyll-boilerplate in anyway, however you can definitely use it by cloning the repository and wiping out the git folder.
git clone git@github.com:KittyGiraudel/jekyll-boilerplate <your_project_name>
cd <your_project_name>
rm -rf .gitWhat’s next
You tell me. Feel free to open an issue on the repository if you have an idea or highly disagree on a choice made in the boilerplate. I’ll be happy to discuss it!