---
title: Creating a Personal Website with Jekyll
author: cscherr
date: 2024-04-11 21:30:00 +0200
categories: [Hosting, Blogging]
tags: [jekyll]
---

If you're someone like me and like to host various services, you might also want
to have your own personal website. There are many approaches to this, for
example you could use a <abbr title="Content Management System">CMS</abbr> like
[WordPress](https://wordpress.org) or [ghost](https://ghost.org), you could use
a static site generator like [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) (that's what GitHub
Pages use) or you could program your own site if you want.

I've tried a bit of all of them, but it never really worked for me. Eventually I
landed on Jekyll, so this is also where you're reading this on now. To be honest,
I don't have too much expertise on the topic, but I made it work, and a Blog
needs posts.

## Pros of Jekyll

### Dead Simple

Usage of Jekyll is really easy in my opinion. You kind of just write markdown
files and add some front matter. That is if you're using a pre-made template
of course, you can make it as complicated as you want, just note that Jekyll
generates static sites, so no fancy server side computation.

### A lot of modern themes

There are a lot of modern and good-looking themes for Jekyll. At the time this
post is written, cscherr.de uses [chirpy](https://github.com/cotes2020/jekyll-theme-chirpy).

A large collection of Jekyll themes can be found
[here](http://jekyllthemes.org/) (note: this site does not use HTTPS for
some reason).

## Cons of Jekyll

### Multilingual sucks

With the chirpy theme at least, I couldn't get Multilingual content to work
without going into the rabbit hole. You can select from a good amount of main
languages, but you cannot have multiple versions of your website for various
languages in a single project.

Various projects for multilingual Jekyll sites exist, but the only one that
seems to be still maintained is [polyglot](https://github.com/untra/polyglot).

## Deployment with Docker

The "official" Jekyll Docker container is unmaintained since 2022, so if you
want to deploy Jekyll with docker you need to create your own container. I based
this on the standard [ruby image](https://hub.docker.com/_/ruby/).

We can use a `Dockerfile` like this:

```Dockerfile
# syntax=docker/dockerfile:1
FROM ruby:3.2
WORKDIR /app

# Add a script to be executed every time the container starts.
COPY entrypoint.sh /usr/bin/
RUN chmod +x /usr/bin/entrypoint.sh
ENTRYPOINT ["entrypoint.sh"]
EXPOSE 4000
```
{: file="Dockerfile" }

We need to mount our Jekyll project to `/app`, it is not included with this
Dockerfile.
{: .prompt-tip }

```bash
#!/bin/bash
set -e

git config --global --add safe.directory /app
rm -f /app/tmp/pids/server.pid
gem update --system
bundle install

# Then exec the container's main process (what's set as CMD in the Dockerfile or
# as command in the docker-compose.yml).
exec "$@"
```
{: file="entrypoint.sh" }

We can then use a `docker-compose.yml`{: .filepath} file to deploy our config

```yaml
services:
  jekyll:
    build: .
    volumes:
      - .:/app
    container_name: jekyll
    ports:
      - 127.0.0.1:4000:4000
    command: bundle exec jekyll serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 4000 --liveserve
```
{: file="docker-compose.yml" }

> Remove the `--liveserve` flag for production environments, or if hosting with a
> reverse proxy. Be sure to rebuild the image if needed. Otherwise, the
> connection might wait for the `liveserve` port (which will probably not exist).
{: .prompt-warning }

Now you should be able to start the docker container with Jekyll inside by using
`docker compose up`. Access your site on [localhost:4000](http://localhost:4000)
.