Jekyll is a

static site generator Static site generators (SSGs) are engines that use text input files (such as Markdown, reStructuredText, and AsciiDoc) to generate static web pages. Static sites generated by static site generators do not require a backend after site generation, ...

written in

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called ...

Tom Preston-Werner Thomas Preston-Werner (born May 27, 1979) is an Americans, American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the free and open-source software community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, ...

. It is distributed under the open source

MIT license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

History

Jekyll was first released by Tom Preston-Werner in 2008. Jekyll was later taken over by Parker Moore, an employee of GitHub who led the release of Jekyll 1. Jekyll started a web development trend towards static websites. Jekyll was ranked the most popular static site generator, largely due to its adoption by GitHub. The idea of the Jamstack formed around Jekyll and the other static site generators that it inspired. GitHub chose to retain Jekyll version 3.x rather than upgrade to 4.0, released in 2019. In 2021, Jekyll developer Frank Taillandier said that the Jekyll codebase "is in frozen mode and permanent hiatus" and recommended users whose needs are not met by the frozen state of Jekyll move to Eleventy, another static site generator. Frank Taillandier died later in 2021.

Features

Jekyll renders

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown i ...

Textile Textile is an umbrella term that includes various fiber-based materials, including fibers, yarns, filaments, threads, different fabric types, etc. At first, the word "textiles" only referred to woven fabrics. However, weaving is not the ...

and Liquid templates, and produces a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache HTTP Server,

Nginx Nginx (pronounced "engine x" ) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 2004. Nginx is free and open-source software ...

or another web server.

Static site generator Static site generators (SSGs) are engines that use text input files (such as Markdown, reStructuredText, and AsciiDoc) to generate static web pages. Static sites generated by static site generators do not require a backend after site generation, ...

do not use databases to generate the pages dynamically. Instead Jekyll supports loading content from

YAML YAML ( and ) (''see '') is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML targets many of the same communications applications as Ext ...

, JSON, CSV, and TSV files into the Liquid templating system. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, a GitHub feature that allows users to host websites based on their GitHub repositories for no additional cost. Jekyll can be used in combination with front-end frameworks such as Bootstrap. Jekyll sites can be connected to cloud-based CMS software such as CloudCannon, Forestry, or Siteleaf, enabling content editors to modify site content without having to know how to code.

Philosophy

According to Jekyll's "README" file,

Jekyll does what you tell it to do — no more, no less. It doesn't try to outsmart users by making bold assumptions, nor does it burden them with needless complexity and configuration. Put simply, Jekyll gets out of your way and allows you to concentrate on what truly matters: your content.

References

External links

* {{Official website
Jekyll Themes

Jekyll Themes
Blog software Free software programmed in Ruby Free static website generators Software using the MIT license