Jekyll made easy with Docker

I have been working with Markdown for my work on Windows Containers, and wanted to try using it for other purposes too like this blog. It’s easy to learn and has a great balance of content to markup. One problem, however, is that it requires a lot of steps to set it up. Let’s see how Docker can come to the rescue.

What’s needed

A Linux machine with the Docker Engine already set up
Your GitHub pages repo
jekyll/jekyll

So let’s get started

Pull your existing GitHub Pages repo:

git clone https://github.com/PatrickLang/patricklang.github.io.git

Run it with the default command: docker run --rm --label=jekyll --volume=$(pwd):/srv/jekyll -it -p 4000:4000 jekyll/jekyll

And it will start up running in the foreground.

Configuration file: /srv/jekyll/_config.yml
            Source: /srv/jekyll
       Destination: /srv/jekyll/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
                    done in 0.404 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/srv/jekyll'
Configuration file: /srv/jekyll/_config.yml
    Server address: http://0.0.0.0:4000/
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

Now, you can access it on the Docker host at http://:4000/

For more details, check out the jekyll/docker wiki

Rendering Drafts on-the-fly

The whole reason I set this up was so that I could take advantage of Jekyll’s draft support to render (but not publish) some work-in-progress pages. All I needed to do was give a custom command when I started the container:

 docker run --label=jekyll --volume=$(pwd):/srv/jekyll -it -d -p 4000:4000 jekyll/jekyll jekyll serve --drafts

By running it in the background with -d, I can continue to git pull on my host to get updated files (including drafts!) from GitHub and render them instantly. Jekyll monitors the directory bound to /srv/jekyll so the container doesn’t need to be restarted.