Setup GH Page Using Chirpy Theme

I have been looking for job for over a month now. I noticed that a lot of job application form asks for personal website/blog. So I decided to start blogging.

Github Pages is the easiest way for this as you don’t need any domain or hosting. All you need a github account. I am going to use Jekyll with Chirpy theme.

You don’t need Jekyll for running Github Pages but Jekyll is a powerful tool that helps you manage your content.

Lets roll

Step 1: Start GH repository

Create a new repository from the Chirpy Starter and name it GH_USERNAME.github.io. If your username is brayan then the repo would be brayan.github.io

Step 2: Clonning

Clone the repository

Step 3: Manage dependencies

From the root directory run bundle install to install the dependencies

Step 4: Running the site localy

Run following command to start the server

bundle exec jekyll serve

If you are using Ruby version 3.0.0 or higher, step 4 may fail. You may fix it by adding webrick to your dependencies by running bundle add webrick.

You should be able to see some content by visiting http://localhost:4000.

Step 5: Update site configuration

Open _config.yml and update the configurations like language, title, tagline, description, github, twitter, social.

Step 6: Update sidebar image

Put an image under assets directory, i.e assets/img/avatar.jpg. Then reference the image in the _config.yml on the avatar key.

avatar: assets/img/avatar.jpg

An image with 300*300 size works best.

Step 7: Customize favicons

Follow the instructions of this post

Step 8: Deployment

If you are not on linux then run bundle lock --add-platform x86_64-linux

• On Github create a new branch named gh-pages.
• Go to Settings tab and from left sidebar go to pages.
• Update the source and hit save.

Screenshot

• commit and push your changes
• Visit https://<username>.github.io/ to see your live blog

It can take few minutes to see the laest change after every push