A Rakefile to simplify previewing and deploying jekyll websites. Latest version supports Jekyll 1.0.0.

1. Download this repository
2. Put the files in your jekyll installation
3. Se the variables in _rake_configuration.yml
4. Start using it!

Note. I use two separate files to keep the Rakefile independent of the configuration; it helps when you are managing more than one website with jekyll. However, if you prefer, you can forget about the _rake_configuration.yml file and set the variables directly in the Rakefile.

The tasks manage URLs for deployment and local preview. This simplifies deployment in a suburi.

More in details: sometime it is difficult to use relative URLs in your Jekyll files (think, e.g., a reference to css files in a layout file used for posts and other pages living at different levels of nesting).

One solution is using the variable {{site.url}}, which can be set in the _config.yml file. By prepending {{site.url}} to the relevant links, URLs are made absolute and are guaranteed to work, no matter where your HTML file will live.

However, using {{site.url}} can break the possibilit of locally previewing your website (e.g. using the jekyll serve command). Consider the case of deploying to a suburi. (Note: it might as well be that I don’t fully understand the deployment/preview options offered by Jekyll, but this is another matter).

The rakefile sets the url variable in the _config.yml using two different settings for local preview and deployment, thus allowing to preview changes locally (url is set to http://localhost:4000) before deploying (the deploy command, in fact, sets the url to the $deploy_url).

Other tasks can simplify your daily life with Jekyll (e.g. creating a post, checking links).

rake preview
rake deploy

The commands made available are:

rake build                           # Build for deployment (but do not deploy)
rake build_static                    # Static build (build using filesystem)
rake check_links                     # Check links for site already running on localhost:4000
rake clean                           # Clean up generated site
rake create_post[post,date,content]  # Create a post
rake deploy                          # Build and deploy to remote server
rake post_changes                    # Create a post with all changes since last deploy
rake preview                         # Preview on local machine (server with --auto)

If you do not put the following directive in your _config.yml file:

exclude: ['Rakefile']

the Rakefile will end up in your website. (It shouldn’t do any harm if you publish it.)

Distributed under the terms of the MIT License