As I discussed in my post on Jekyll, you can run Jekyll in a container. I’ve since modified this process somewhat due to running into what looks like a 2020 windowing bug with old versions of Ruby.
Inital Setup
You’ll need a directory, which we will call /opt/jekyll, which will contain a directory bundle and a directory blog.github.io, both of which should be owned by the apache user. I assume this user is UID 48 and GID 48.
mkdir -p /opt/jekyll/bundle
mkdir -p /opt/jekyll/blog.github.io
chown -R apache:apache /opt/jekyll/bundle /opt/jekyll/blog.github.io
Your Github Pages site should be checked out to that directory above. You will also need a Gemfile in there, with content like this;
source "https://rubygems.org"
gem "github-pages", group: :jekyll_plugins
# Review https://pages.github.com/versions/ for versions
group :jekyll_plugins do
gem "jekyll-sitemap"
gem "jekyll-feed"
gem "jekyll-seo-tag"
gem "jekyll-paginate"
end
# Windows and JRuby does not include zoneinfo files, so bundle the tzinfo-data gem
# and associated library.
install_if -> { RUBY_PLATFORM =~ %r!mingw|mswin|java! } do
gem "tzinfo", "~> 1.2"
gem "tzinfo-data"
end
# Performance-booster for watching directories on Windows
gem "wdm", "~> 0.1.1", :install_if => Gem.win_platform?
Constructing the Ruby environment
First of all, we’re going to use the Dockerhub jekyll image. Specifically, the tag docker.io/jekyll/jekyll:pages, which is made for replicating Github Pages. I’m also assuming you are using podman, change the commands to Docker if you’re using that.
podman pull docker.io/jekyll/jekyll:pages
Now it’s necessary to run up the container and get into it so you can set up the initial environment. Remove the ,z from the mounts if you don’t have SELinux;
podman run -it --rm --name jekyll \
-v /opt/jekyll/blog.github.io:/srv/jekyll:rw,z \
-v /opt/jekyll/bundle:/usr/local/bundle:rw,z \
-e JEKYLL_UID=48 \
-e JEKYLL_GID=48 \
docker.io/jekyll/jekyll:pages \
bash
This will drop you into a Bash prompt in a transient container which will be removed when you exit. To set up the environment, we have to install some packages first, then run Jekyll to install the rest.
cd /srv/jekyll
apk --no-cache add --virtual build_deps make gcc build-base ruby-dev libc-dev linux-headers libxml2-dev libxslt-dev
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll build --drafts
After that’s done, Jekyll should have built your site into _site and should have completed. Now we can set up the container to run properly.
Running it in Serve mode
Because Jekyll will by default serve to localhost, we need to override that. We’ll also allow drafts because this is a local install. And we will publish port 4000 on the container out of the host so we can get at it with a browser;
podman run -it --rm --name jekyll \
-v /opt/jekyll/blog.github.io:/srv/jekyll:rw,z \
-v /opt/jekyll/bundle:/usr/local/bundle:rw,z \
--publish 4000:4000 \
-e JEKYLL_UID=48 \
-e JEKYLL_GID=48 \
docker.io/jekyll/jekyll:pages \
bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts --host=0.0.0.0
And that’s pretty well it.
Updating your Gems
In order to update your gems, repeat the command above that got you into a Bash prompt, then;
cd /srv/jekyll
rm Gemfile.lock
apk --no-cache add --virtual build_deps make gcc build-base ruby-dev libc-dev linux-headers libxml2-dev libxslt-dev
bundle update
Exit out, then restart the container.