Testing Website Changes Locally

You can run jekyll locally while writing your blog posts. This is extremely useful for ensuring you don't break the web site by uploading your blog post. Please note that sometimes, even if your website works locally, it could break when uploaded to github (because github uses a slightly different version of jekyll sometimes). The following instructions are adapted from the jekyll-bootstrap quick start guide

First, to edit or add posts to the site, you will need to clone the repository. If you are a member of the github organization group, then you should clone the repository in authenticated mode with the following command:

git clone git@github.com/charlab/charlab.github.io.git

Which will create a new local repository in charlab.github.io in whichever directory you invoked that command. Next you will need ruby installed on your machine. Many systems come with it preinstalled, and you can check for its existence by running ruby --version at the command line.

This web site uses jekyll so you will want to install it next. The recommended method is to use the following command line:

gem install jekyll

Once installed, you should change into the charlab repository:

cd charlab.github.io

Finally, you should run the jekyll server:

jekyll server -w

The -w argument tells the server to automatically update when it sees changes to files, such as a new blog post being added. If you run the server without -w then you will need to stop it (probably with ctrl-c) and start it again each time you want to see the changes you made.

One important note is that changes to the _config.yml file require restarting the server to be seen, even if you run with the -w argument.