Update

See here for a briefer and more up-to-date version of the process described here (which is from late 2014).

Serve Markdown via github.io

GitHub Pages are great but wouldn't you like to be able to use .md files instead of having to provide HTML?

As it turns out with the right boilerplate this is simple to do and is demonstrated here.

Compare the file redcarpet-extensions.md as it appears here on github.com and as it appears served as HTML via github.io:

• github.com redcarpet-extensions.md
• github.io redcarpet-extensions.html

Note the change in suffix between the two - from .md to .html.

If you compare the two you will notice some slight differences:

• When looked at on github.com you'll see an initial small table (showing layout as "default" and title as "Configuring Redcarpet") that isn't present in the github.io version. This is front matter and is explained later.
• If you go down to the highlight section on github.io and compare it with the same section on github.com you'll see highlighting in action in the github.io version but not in the github.com version. This is because Github filters out all but a subset of HTML tags when your content is displayed mixed in with theirs.
• The content area is slightly wider on github.io than on github.com - this is because the content area has expanded into the area that was taken up by the GitHub sidebar for settings etc.
• The syntax highlighting is slightly different - the github.io version uses the standard settings of the default Jekyll highlighter Pygments while the version on github.com uses the syntax highlighting of GitHub's own linguist system.

The important thing is front matter - it's the one change you have to make to a standard .md file in order for it to be served via github.io.

This README.md will not served via github.io as it has no front matter.

If you look at the raw version of redcarpet-extensions.md you'll see an initial block of text:

---
layout: default
title: Configuring Redcarpet
---

This is the front matter - several variables between lines of three minuses. Any number of variables can be specified - the block above shows the simplest case - a layout name ("default" which corresponds to a .html file covered later) and a title for the resulting HTML page.

Creating a copy

To use this repository as a basis for your own you need to create an empty repository on GitHub, let's call it "my-pages", and then duplicate "basic-gfm-jekyll" like so:

$ git clone --bare git@github.com:george-hawkins/basic-gfm-jekyll.git
$ cd basic-gfm-jekyll.git  
$ git push --mirror git@github.com:<your-username>/my-pages
$ rm -rf basic-gfm-jekyll.git

Replace <your-username> with your GitHub username. Once you've duplicated the repository you can pull down your copy:

$ git clone git@github.com:<your-username>/my-pages
$ cd my-pages

Duplicating repositories is covered in more detail on GitHub help.

If you aren't using an ssh key with your account you'll have to use https style URLs rather than the git style ones used above, i.e. replace git@github.com: with https://github.com/.

Now you'll need to make two small but important changes to the file _config.yml found in the base directory of the repository.

In _config.yml you'll see the following two lines:

baseurl: "/basic-gfm-jekyll"
url: "https://george-hawkins.github.io"

You need to replace basic-gfm-jekyll with the name of your repository, i.e. my-pages in this example, and you need to replace george-hawkins with your GitHub username.

Without the baseurl change nothing will work at all and without the url change your github.io content will references my github.io site.

Creating new content

Now that you have a copy of this repository you can remove README.md and redcarpet-extensions.md, everything else is necessary boilerplate.

To add new content simply create new .md files and remember to add front matter as shown above.

Important: without a front matter block a .md file will not be served via github.io.

Any new content, once pushed to GitHub, can be accessed via github.io by replacing the .md in the file name with .html, i.e. my-content.md becomes my-content.html when retrieved via github.io.

That's it - for some explanation of the mechanics read on.

Jekyll

GitHub uses a static site generator called Jekyll that converts various formats, such as .md, into HTML. Jekyll also supports a templating engine called Liquid.

_config.xml etc. along with front matter drive how the Jekyll engine will render .md files into the HTML content served via github.io.

Jekyll supports various Markdown processors, the one that handles .md files in the way that GitHub does is called Redcarpet.

Boilerplate

So what are the various boilerplate files? Here's a brief explanation of each:

• _config.yml - this contains variables and configuration for Jekyll, see the Jekyll configuration page for more details.
• _includes/anchor_links.html - this create the visible anchors you see when you hover your mouse over a heading, see the "hover anchors" section of redcarpet-extensions.md for more details.
• _layouts/default.html - take a look at this file, it provides the very simple HTML that surrounds your .md content (which ends up where you see {{ content }}). The name of this file minus the .html suffix, i.e. default, corresponds to the layout name you saw above in the front matter.
• css/container.css - this is the very simple CSS for the <div> and <article> elements seen in default.html.
• css/syntax.css - this is the CSS needed for syntax highlighting.

As mentioned above syntax highlighting is handled by a tool called Pygments and the syntax.css file was generated using the pygmentize command like so:

$ pygmentize -S default -f html > css/syntax.css

In addition to the two .css files already mentioned default.html pulls in two further .css files that replicate the .css that GitHub uses when serving .md content:

• github-markdown.css - this comes from Sindre Sorhus's github-markdown-css project and provides the CSS needed for the GitHub Markdown style.
• normalize.css - this comes from Nicolas Gallagher's normalize.css project and tries to make all HTML elements render more consistently across all browsers.

Final notes

The page redcarpet-extensions.md is mainly intended as an example of making .md content available via github.io but it does also explain the various options you can specify in _config.yml that control how Redcarpet works.

You can use Liquid markup in your pages served via github.io, however this markup is not processed when the same .md is viewed on github.com. For an example see how the Liquid tag raw is not processed when you look at the "hover anchors" section of redcarpet-extensions.md on github.com but is consumed when you look at the same section on github.io.