Jekyll Tips & Tricks

This post covers some more Jekyll tips and tricks like searching a web page.

Searching a Jekyll page

Web pages based on databases such as WordPress search the data in the underlying database. Static web sites based on Jekyll however don’t have this database but only files.

Good descriptions of how they can be searched:

• Vanilla js search

Copy to Clipboard button

See Add copy to clipboard in Jekyll

Link on same page

See this StackOverflow question.

You have to enable auto_ids in _config.yml:

kramdown:
    auto_ids: true

Then headlines have the id of the hyphon concatenated words. This chapter for example: link-on-same-page. Link to it using #link-on-same-page.

Publish to OSX local apache server

OSX has a local apache server build in, see Setting up a local web server.

The pages reside under ~<user>/Sites. Normally, you would create a sub-site in that directory, for instance: ~<user>/mypages.

To build your Jekyll static pages directly to that site, use (assuming the user is mmgreiner):

jekyll build --drafts -d ~/Sites/mypages --baseurl "~mmgreiner/mypages"

Note the quotes on the last argument. If you don’t use these quotes, the shell will expand the ~ and it will pass the wrong base url.

You can now browse to http://localhost/~mmgreiner/mypages to see your Jekyll build local static pages.