What is Jekyll

March 15, 2017

Jekyll is a static blog generator. One among the many SSG: Static Site Generators out there. A famous one, for a long time. This blog was originally built in Jekyll and now migrated to Gastby

Let’s say you have few pages of raw text and want to convert them into web pages. Jekyll can do that for you. What more? you can install a theme, add a new font, images and numerous plugins to make it a rich website.

Jekyll is not a CMS

Jekyll is not a Content Management System. Every time you run Jekyll, the entire site gets generated into one bundle with all the required assets like fonts, image and style. There’s no backend database or API to connect. Jekyll works best for the landing page, static sites and blogs. Jekyll is not a replacement for CMS.

Static vs Server generated

Your website can be built locally or deployed from the server when you edit changes directly. Regardless, it requires a basic understanding of template engines, markdown and version control.

Free hosting by Github Pages

GitHub pages offer free hosting for Jekyll sites. This website is built using Jekyll. I will cover more about setting up Jekyll and hosting in a separate blog.

Plugins

Though Jekyll is not a CMS. You can do pretty much everything a site can have. Tagging, SEO, Search, Pages etc.., all with a support of Plugins. Checkout here for plugins

Theme

Jekyll got a huge collection of free and paid themes just like wordpress. More theme here

Other static site generators