A boilerplate project including full setup for Jekyll, GulpJS, SASS, PostCSS, BrowserSync, Autoprefixer and deploy to GitHub Pages using Gulp.

The boilerplate is loaded with Bootstrap and jQuery (via CDN) to get you started with your projects. I have also included some SEO optimizations and Open Graph tags / Twitter Cards tags to tell Facebook and Twitter how shares to your site should display (Note: Look at _includes/metas.html and change accordingly).

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System Preparation

To use this starter boilerplate project, you’ll need the following things installed on your machine.

1. Jekyll – $ gem install jekyll
2. NodeJS – use the installer.
3. GulpJS – $ npm install -g gulp (mac users may need sudo)
4. jekyll-minifier – $ gem install jekyll-minifier

Local Installation

1. Clone this repo, or download it into a directory of your choice.

git clone https://github.com/esausilva/jekyll-gulp-boilerplate.git

2. Inside the directory, run npm install.

Usage

I have two Yaml configuration files: _config.yml and _config.dev.yml that when running in development mode the dev configuration file overrides baseurl and jekyll-minifier default values.

Development Mode

Running development mode will not minify your HTML or Javascript.

Also if you are deploying to GitHub Pages – Project Pages, overriding the baseurl to empty (“”) is essential to display the website correctly in localhost.

NODE_ENV=dev gulp

Jekyll

As this is just a Jekyll project, you can use any of the commands listed in their docs.

Deploy with Gulp to GitHub Pages (Production Mode)

To accomplish this I am using gulp-gh-pages and the final site will have HTML, CSS and Javascript minified.

In a nutshell, you need to have your project in GitHub and deploy to to a *gh-pages* branch. Then to deploy just run

NODE_ENV=prod gulp deploy

or simply

gulp deploy

Something to note is that in the gulp deploy task gulp.src() needs to be the path to your final site folder, which by default will be _site. If you change the destination in your _config.yml file, be sure to reflect that in your gulpfile.

Getting Your Branch Prepared

git init
git add .
git commit -m 'First Commit'
git remote add origin git@github.com:username/repository-name.git
git push -u origin master
git checkout --orphan gh-pages
git rm -rf .
touch README.md
git add README.md
git commit -m "Init gh-pages"
git push --set-upstream origin gh-pages
git checkout master

And finally you can deploy to GitHub Pages

gulp deploy

After deploying run the Gulp `clean` task since while deploying gulp-gh-pages creates a .publish directory with your entire site, and in my opinion it just a waste of hard disk space to leave it alone.

gulp clean

or simply Right Click -> Delete that direcotry to delete it.

GirHub Repository

jekyll-gulp-boilerplate

Screenshots

This is how the boilerplate template looks like.

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