Boilerplate-ing Jekyll

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 realised 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 assets folder 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 main element, presence of a lang attribute…).

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 .git

What’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!