How I Automated My Jekyll Process (Or: I Changed My Mind, I Do Want Plugins)

It’s a new year, and time for change. When I first built this blog using Jekyll a few months ago, I figured I would host it on Github Pages because 1) it was free and 2) I didn’t think I would ever need plugins. Well, things change.

The reason I decided to finally make this leap is silly. Let me take you through my process:

I’m recording more footage while playing games.
I want to share more of this footage in bite-size GIFs.
I start to explore other, better options like gfycat.
I run across a blog post describing how to add a gfycat plugin to Jekyll.

And here we are with a newly automated blogging process, all because I wanted to easily do things like this:

That is an embedded gfycat generated with one little liquid tag:

{% gfycat LivelySmoothAmericanbobtail %}.

I don’t know why this was the thing to convert me to plugins. It’s actually the first one I’ve integrated too, I haven’t even figured out which other plugins I want to use yet.

This was my biggest pain point: I wanted to use plugins, but I absolutely didn’t want to build, commit, and deploy manually every time I wrote a new blog post. I started googling and ran across a few people who had used rake to automate the process, eventually finding this thoroughly helpful post with an example rakefile. Rake is a build automation tool, and inside this rakefile are two different tasks: generate and publish.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
require "rubygems"
require "tmpdir"

require "bundler/setup"
require "jekyll"


# Change your GitHub reponame
GITHUB_REPONAME = "sethxd/sethxd.github.io"


desc "Generate blog files"
task :generate do
  Jekyll::Site.new(Jekyll.configuration({
    "source"      => ".",
    "destination" => "_site"
  })).process
end


desc "Generate and publish blog to gh-pages"
task :publish => [:generate] do
  Dir.mktmpdir do |tmp|
    cp_r "_site/.", tmp

    pwd = Dir.pwd
    Dir.chdir tmp

    system "git init"
    system "git add ."
    message = "Site updated at #{Time.now.utc}"
    system "git commit -m #{message.inspect}"
    system "git remote add origin git@github.com:#{GITHUB_REPONAME}.git"
    system "git push origin master --force"

    Dir.chdir pwd
  end
end

The generate task just builds the blog, and the publish task first runs generate, then pushes the generated site to the master branch of the repository. This method of automation requires two branches for the repository:

source for all the Jekyll files and raw configuration
master for the generated site

I actually had a lot of trouble getting this up and running, mostly due to my inexperience with git. But that blog post I linked above was very helpful, and the comment thread is full of the common problems and solutions you might run across.