Scott's Jekyll Build System

This is Scott Severance's build system for Jekyll websites. It supports the following features:

• Development and production targets
• Deployment using rsync over ssh
• Minifies HTML and JavaScript in production, deployment, or when not watching or generating incremental builds. CSS minification can be handled by Jekyll itself. Configure this through a Jekyll configuration file (such as _config.yml).
• Uses Jekyll's --incremental and --watch options by default, but these can be turned off. Can optionally run the Jekyll server.
• Automatically or manually generates ctags, ignoring the _site directory.
• Handles Git pushing to multiple remotes.
• On Windows, will launch XAMPP's Apache server

I'm releasing it publicly in case anyone finds it useful. However, its features are primarily motivated by my own needs. Pull requests are welcome if you want to improve it. Otherwise, feel free to fork it if you need to modify it for your own purposes.

I run this build system on both Linux (primarily) and Windows (occasionally). It works in both places. In theory, it should run on any system which supports the dependencies. However, I haven't tested this theory. In particular, I don't know whether it will run on MacOS. (I'll accept a donated Mac in order to ensure compatibility. 😊)

Dependencies

• Python 3.6 or newer
• The Python module htmlmin (you can install it with pip)
• Bash. On Windows, Git Bash has been tested, and it is unknown whether other ways of installing/using Bash will work. On other OSes, the default Bash ought to work.
• A properly set up Jekyll site which can be called using bundle exec jekyll
• Assumes that the Jekyll project uses two configuration files: _config.yml and _config_production.yml, with the former used for all the builds and the latter only for production builds. These files are currently hardcoded.

The following Gemfile is known to work:

# A sample Gemfile
source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "jekyll", '= 3.8.4'
gem 'octopress', '~> 3.0'
gem 'wdm', '>= 0.1.0' if Gem.win_platform?

Installation

1. Clone this repository anywhere you like. You can place it in a central location and refer to it from all your Jekyll projects, or you can add it to your project as a Git submodule.

2. Copy build_config_sample.jsonc to your project's base directory and call it _build_config.jsonc. Feel free to check this file into your project's source control.

3. Edit _build_config.jsonc to set the appropriate configuration options. For documentation on the "minify_options" key, run minify_html_js.py --help.

4. Copy deploy_config_sample.jsonc to your project's base directory. Either call it _deploy.jsonc or pass in the path to the configuration file every time you deploy.

5. Edit your deploy configuration file and configure it to deploy your site. Note: At present, the only deploy method supported is rsync.

6. Optional: Symlink build into your project's root directory. Important: Symlink it; don't copy it. Otherwise, the build script won't be able to find its support files.

Usage

For normal development, run ./build with no arguments. To deploy, run ./build --deploy. For more detailed documentation, run ./build --help.