Github provides a great service for technique bloggers: Github Pages. Just by creating a repo in GitHub, we can host a domain like http://username.github.io. And with Jekyll we can write blogs with Markdown and preview blog pages locally and conveniently.

The problem for me is that my work environment is Windows, and it’s not easy to install Jekyll in Windows(especially in China). So an idea comes out with me is to use Docker.

So let’s do it!

Requirements

Assume that:

Step One

Pull official Jekyll Docker image in your docker host machine.

    docker pull jekyll/jekyll

Step Two

Move to your blog repo directory, for me is /c/Users/ewenfga/Code/github.io/Wenfeng-GAO.github.io because docker automatically mount with my C disk.

Run

    docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/srv/jekyll -it jekyll/jekyll bash

This line of code will run the jekyll image interatively and mount /srv/jekylldirectory with current directory. That’s why we move to this GitHub repo.

Run

    jekyll new . --force

This jekyll command will create all what we need for blogs, including a _post directory where we place our blogs.

Step Three

Quit the docker container(Ctrl d). By now we have setup our blog’s structure by jekyll, all is done and we can push to GibHub and see our blogs on the internet if we wish.

But Jekyll also provides us a wonderful local server, by which we can preview what we write locally.

Run

    docker run --rm --label=jekyll --volume=$(pwd):/srv/jekyll -it -p 4000:4000

jekyll/jekyll

This line of code will run a docker container as a server and export port 4000.

I recommand you to make an alias for this piece of code as we’ll use it often.

Step Final

Ok, now lets open our browser and type <your-docker-host-machine-ip>:4000 in the navigation bar, you will see something like: jekyll screenshot Enjoy!