Jekyll (software)

Last updated
Jekyll
Developer(s) Tom Preston-Werner, Nick Quaranto, Parker Moore, Alfred Xing, Olivia Hugger, Frank Taillandier, Pat Hawks, Matt Rogers
Initial releaseNovember 5, 2008;15 years ago (2008-11-05) [1]
Stable release
4.3.3 [2] / 27 December 2023;4 months ago (27 December 2023)
Repository
Written in Ruby
Operating system Cross-platform
Platform Web
Type Blog publishing system
License MIT License
Website jekyllrb.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby by Tom Preston-Werner. It is distributed under the open source MIT license.

Contents

History

Jekyll was first released by Tom Preston-Werner in 2008. [3] Jekyll was later taken over by Parker Moore, an employee of GitHub who led the release of Jekyll 1. [4]

Jekyll started a web development trend towards static websites. [5] As of 2017 Jekyll was ranked the most popular static site generator, largely due to its adoption by GitHub. [6] The idea of the Jamstack formed around Jekyll and the other static site generators that it inspired. [6]

GitHub chose to retain Jekyll version 3.x rather than upgrade to 4.0, released in 2019. In 2021, Jekyll developer Frank Taillandier said that the Jekyll codebase "is in frozen mode and permanent hiatus" and recommended users whose needs are not met by the frozen state of Jekyll move to Eleventy, another static site generator. Frank Taillandier died later in 2021. The Jekyll project on GitHub, however, continues to be updated and releases are being made for bug fixes. [7]

Features

Jekyll renders Markdown or Textile and Liquid templates, and produces a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache HTTP Server, Nginx or another web server. [8] Static site generators do not use databases to generate the pages dynamically. Instead Jekyll supports loading content from YAML, JSON, CSV, and TSV files into the Liquid templating system. [9] Jekyll has built in support, and is selectable as the build engine by default, in GitHub Pages, [10] a GitHub feature that allows users to host websites based on their GitHub public repositories for no additional cost.

Jekyll can be used in combination with front-end frameworks such as Bootstrap. [11] Jekyll sites can be connected to cloud-based CMS software such as CloudCannon, Forestry, or Siteleaf, enabling content editors to modify site content without having to know how to code. [12]

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References

  1. "jekyll/History.markdown at master · jekyll/jekyll". GitHub . Retrieved 26 October 2020.
  2. "Release 4.3.3". 27 December 2023. Retrieved 19 January 2024.
  3. Preston-Werner, Tom (17 Nov 2008). "Blogging Like a Hacker". Preston-Werner.com. Archived from the original on 19 September 2019. Retrieved 10 Oct 2015.
  4. Autrand, Aaron. "Interview with Parker Moore from Jekyll". netlify.com. Archived from the original on 13 March 2021.
  5. Christensen, Mathias Biilmann (16 Nov 2015). "Static Website Generators Reviewed: Jekyll, Middleman, Roots, Hugo". Smashing Magazine . Archived from the original on 27 August 2016. Retrieved 2 Feb 2016.
  6. 1 2 Williamson, Eli. "Top Ten Static Site Generators of 2017 | Netlify". netlify.com. Archived from the original on 13 March 2021. Retrieved 11 Feb 2018.
  7. Anderson, Tim (September 14, 2021). "Future of Jekyll project (engine behind GitHub Pages) in doubt?". The Register.
  8. "README.markdown for Jekyll software". Jekyll's authors. Retrieved February 19, 2014.
  9. "Data Files". Jekyll • Simple, blog-aware, static sites. Retrieved 2020-11-09.
  10. "About GitHub Pages and Jekyll". GitHub documentation. Retrieved May 10, 2024.
  11. Patton, Tony (2014-07-16). "Build full-featured sites with Jekyll, Bootstrap, and GitHub". TechRepublic. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  12. "Blogging platform utilizing Kentico Cloud and Jekyll static site generator" (PDF). Masaryk University Faculty of Informatics.