Deploying locally

After you have forked our repository, cloned it to your local machine and done some changes, you'll surely want to see the results of your work. To do so, you'll have to deploy the website locally on your machine. This can be done as follows:

Option 1: Manual Installation

Tip

Getting Ruby up and running on Windows can be quite a challenge. You're likely better off using Docker (see below for instructions) to deploy the website if you're developing on Windows.

1. Install a full Ruby development environment as described in the official Jekyll guide.
2. Install Jekyll and bundler gems:

gem install jekyll bundler

3. In your working directory (this is where you cloned the website to), install the other dependencies of the gemfile:

bundle install

4. Then you can deploy the Jekyll site locally:

bundle exec jekyll serve

which outputs:

> Configuration file: /Users/octocat/my-site/_config.yml
>            Source: /Users/octocat/my-site
>       Destination: /Users/octocat/my-site/_site
> Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
>      Generating...
>                    done in 0.309 seconds.
> Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/Users/octocat/my-site'
> Configuration file: /Users/octocat/my-site/_config.yml
>    Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000/
>  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

Note

If you want to display scheduled sites as well, add a --future parameter at the end: bundle exec jekyll serve --future. To enable other devices in your local network to connect to the site as well, add a --host 0.0.0.0 parameter.

The local site can the be viewed at http://localhost:4000/. It is automatically rebuilt after modifying a file.

Option 2: Use Docker

1. Install Docker Desktop on Windows or macOS. Alternatively you can install Docker directly on Linux.
2. Use docker-compose up to start your local server.

The local site can the be viewed at http://localhost:4000/ (even though the console points to http://0.0.0.0:4000/ as the server address). It is automatically rebuilt after modifying a file.