A couple of weeks ago this site was rebuilt using Jekyll and moved to Github Pages. If you want to learn more about Jekyll + Github, checkout the Github site.
I kept running into an issue with needing a different site.url configuration for my local environment and my production (in this case GitHub) environment. Fortunately Jekyll makes this easy to overcome by allowing you to have multiple config files. Here’s how:
Make a new config file
Start by making and saving a new file called _config-dev.yml. This file will be used to trump any declarations we need to for our local environment. It also could be named zaphodBeeblebrox.yml for all it really mattered. For now just include the following:
url: http://localhost:4000
Relaunch Jekyll
Traditionally your command to start Jekyll looks something like this:
jekyll serve -w
This by default looks for the _config.yml in your site folder and rebuilds your site as you make changes to the files. Instead, launch Jekyll with the following:
jekyll serve -w --config _config.yml,_config-dev.yml
Test
Jekyll does a good job of telling you if your syntax is messed up somewhere. If you don’t get any errors on launch, you should be able to see your site at http://localhost:4000/.
Add config file to .gitignore (optional)
The _config-dev.yml file isn’t going to hurt anything by having it in your Github repo. By default Github Pages won’t even notice it. I would recommend you add it to your .gitignore file anyway. One less file in your git repo to keep track of and confuse potential forkers. Need help?
I hope this quick tip helps someone out. If you have any questions, ping me on twitter (@alexjlehner) or email me.