Install Jekyll

I find it best to use the conda package manager to install ruby, then use ruby to install the github-pages gem, which contains the set of gems (including Jekyll) used by GitHub Pages itself to compile each site. If conda is not already installed, install conda first.

To install/update to the latest version of the github-pages gem, run the following commands:

conda env update -f env_ruby.yml --prune
conda activate ruby

# Install/update to the latest version of github-pages gem
# (but don't install unnecessary documentation).
# Then cleanup old versions of installed gems.
gem install github-pages --no-document
gem cleanup

If the gem install github-pages command causes an error, try the following commands and then try installing the github-pages gem again:

• On Ubuntu or Debian-based systems:

  # for Ubuntu
  sudo apt update  # update package index
  sudo apt upgrade build-essential  # compilation tools

• On macOS: you may need to install Xcode from the App Store.

Build

Build locally: jekyll build [options]

Serve locally: jekyll serve [options]

Options

• --baseurl /~chrisyeh: add this if hosting this site at some non-root domain (e.g., *.com/~chrisyeh)
• --drafts: to show drafts among the latest posts
• --force_polling: use this when running Jekyll on WSL to enable auto-regeneration.

Page Frontmatter Options

Variable	Description
excerpt	text to show on blog list and at top of post
last_updated	date in YYYY-MM-DD format
layout	name of layout from _layout/ folder
tags	list of tags, e.g., [ML, math]
title	title of post
use_code	boolean, set to true to include code-highlighting CSS
use_fontawesome	boolean, set to true to include FontAwesome CSS
use_math	boolean, set to true to include MathJax JS
use_toc	boolean, set to true to include a table of contents