Discovering Jekyll

I decided to give a chance to Jekyll after I realized that you can deploy it for free on Github! This is also my first post on this blog, I would report here the procedure I did to start with Jekyll. This will be useful when I will write the second post!

The Jekyll environment

I created a Docker image to recreate the develompent environment every time.
I know, there is already an Offcial Jekyll Docker image but it’s so heavy!
I created a Dockerfile starting from Alpine:

FROM alpine:3.7

LABEL maintainer="marco.bore@gmail.com"


RUN apk add --update curl vim \

    build-base \
    python \
    libxslt-dev libffi-dev \
    ruby-dev ruby-io-console ruby-irb ruby-json ruby-rake \
    && gem install --no-document jekyll bundle

EXPOSE 4000

The last line is the most important:

• allows you to connect to the container throught port 4000.

Build and run the container

When I have more that 3 docker options I usually create a run.sh file.

#!/bin/bash

echo 'Building container...'
docker build -t cnt-jekyll .
docker run -it --rm \

   --name=jekyll \

   -v `pwd`/file:/file \

   -w "/file" \

   -h jekyll \

   cnt-jekyll \

   /bin/sh

The most important parameter is:

• -v that mount the local ./file/ directory inside the container You can now develop your Jekyll website in this directory without loosing your work in case the container stops.

Serve Jekyll

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve --host 0.0.0.0 

Pleaset notice that if you don’t specify the --host option, you will reach Jekyll just from the container inside.

You can now reach Jekyll typing in the browser jekyll.ip.inthe.dockerbridge:4000

My personal impression

Pro:

• At every change the static website is rebuild
• Is easy to understart the content structure

Contra:

• Why I need to install python to use pygments?
• I took some time to get Jekyll up and running