Building the website online or locally?

A short blogpost about the process I just followed to switch my website online building + publishing process to a more local, more free and faster workflow.

Building with Github Actions

Github Pages leverage the powerful capabilities of Github Actions to build Jekyll websites online. This saves you from having to install anything on your computer, just write your Markdown content in your usual IDE or even directly on Github. Until today, my process was in two steps: I was building the website locally to have a very interactive building process and then I would push the code and let Github Pages build the website another time. Before pushing any changes to Github, I could build, see the rendered modifications in the website in several cautious steps without waiting for the Github Action to finish. The html files I was creating locally with jekyll build were not synced with git or Github.

The main disadvantage is that Github Pages does not allow downloading some plugins and I felt limited with this setup.
I’m also looking into the future where I see that I’ll be switching from Jekyll to Quarto which is booming and R based and more in tune with my global experience and profile. Github Pages use Jekyll to build websites not Quarto, Quarto users have to build their websites and Github Pages will “only” host it.

Building locally and pushing html files

The change from one process to the other can be done in two steps:

1. Locally:

• Change the path where Jekyll will build the website: add destination: docs/ in the _config.yml file.
• jekyll build to create the website in docs/
• Create an empty .nojekyll file at the root of your repository or run touch .nojekyll (Mac/Linux) or copy NUL .nojekyll (Windows) in your command line tool.
• (Remove _site/ and delete “_site/” from .gitignore)
• Push your changes

2. In Github: go to the settings of your repository, go to Github Pages and edit the folder where Github Pages will look for your site: in /docs
   You can consult the Quarto documentation for more details.

Besides better control of your environment and the ability of installing more plugins, another advantage of building locally is the possibility of having a local version of your theme (minimal-mistake in my case) locally instead of Jekyll downloading it every time the website is built. In my case, this reduces the build time from 10 seconds to 1… In your _config.yml file, just replace remote_theme: mmistakes/minimal-mistakes with theme: minimal-mistakes-jekyll and add gem "minimal-mistakes-jekyll" to your gemfile before running bundle install in your terminal.

Additional plugins

At the moment, some of the plugins I would like to use include tools to improve the Search Engine Optimization of the website and another plugin to make tables interactive and searchable.