Jenn Tesolin

Jekyll: The configuration file

Update in progress: This post is based on an older setup and is being kept for reference while I work on a fuller update. For a newer example, check out my latest config file on GitHub.

The Jekyll configuration file (_config.yml) holds important settings for your site. This post highlights some of the options I used in an older version of my homepage, which was built from my Jekyll GitHub repository as a static site.

This file includes quite a few settings you may want to edit, especially if you need to override some of the default Jekyll options.

My _config.yml contained three main sections, which are explained in more detail below.

Site settings

This section defines what your site is and where it lives.

  • title: Usually your site or company name.
  • description: Used for the meta description tag.
  • baseurl: As the official docs put it, this “serves the site from the specified URL.” Do not include your hostname.
  • url: The full URL of your site.
  • timezone: Your time zone. Use a format such as America/Toronto or America/New_York.
  • plugins: Any plugins used by the site.
# Site settings
title: Jennifer Tesolin
description: "This is Jennifer Tesolin's personal web site. Located on this site are tutorials and tips for web developers."
baseurl: ""
url: "https://jenntesolin.com"
timezone : "America/Toronto"
plugins: [jekyll-paginate]

Build settings

This section tells Jekyll how to build the site and which files to use.

  • exclude: Tells Jekyll what not to include in the build. Format: [file1, file2]
  • markdown: Which Markdown flavour you want to use.
  • markdown_ext: File extensions to use for Markdown files.
  • permalink: What your site URLs will look like. Example: /blog/:year/:month/:day/:title/
  • paginate: How many posts to show per page.
  • paginate_path: The URL format for paginated results. Example: blog/page:num
  • gems: Jekyll-specific gems included in the build.
  • name: Your site name.
  • feed path: Location of the RSS or Atom feed file.
# Build Settings
exclude: [Gemfile, Gemfile.lock, README.md, vendor, bin,changelog.md,wordpress.xml,package.json,Gruntfile.js,node_modules, .ruby-version]
markdown: kramdown
markdown_ext:  markdown,mkdown,mkdn,mkd,md
textile_ext:   textile
permalink: /blog/:year/:month/:day/:title/
paginate: 10
paginate_path: "blog/page:num"
gems:
  - jekyll-feed
name: Jennifer Tesolin Website
feed:
  path: atom.xml

Author information

This section is used to display information about the site owner, such as name, email, Twitter handle, GitHub repository, and location. The nested values should be indented one level under author:.

author :
  name : Jennifer Tesolin
  email : me@jenntesolin.com
  location : Toronto (Canada)
  github : jennifert
  twitter : jenntes

Issues encountered

One issue I ran into was that it did not seem easy to create new elements in the configuration file and then reuse them elsewhere. For example, when converting this site to Jekyll, I was unable to add another social network item under the author section and then reuse it in files such as include/footer.html and humans.txt.

Additional information and elements

The configuration docs from the official Jekyll site are worth reading. They include a lot of useful information and other settings you can use in your file.

Bonus: Git ignore for Jekyll

Here is a sample of my .gitignore file:

# OS X / Windows Files
.DS_Store
Thumbs.db

# NODE
.node_modules
node_modules
*/node_modules
/node_modules/*
npm-debug.log
package-lock.json
.env

# JEKYLL
.sass-cache/
.jekyll-cache/
.jekyll-metadata
.rvmrc
*.gem