April 3, 2019 1 min to read

Test your Jekyll Site on localhost using Docker

In order to run a Jekyll site, there are at least three steps involved.

• Create the Jekyll configuration or use a pre-configured template.
• Build this site
• Serve the pages

Step 1: Download and extract a pre-configured site from Barry Clark’s Github.

Step 2: Build the site using jekyll build

If the site was extracted to /c/Users/vimal/Documents/GitHub/vimal-krishna.github.io, use the following command to use the Jekyll Docker container to do the build for you.

docker run --rm -v //c/Users/vimal/Documents/GitHub/vimal-krishna.github.io:/srv/jekyll 
	-v //home/docker/vendor/bundle:/usr/local/bundle 
	-it -p 4000:4000 jekyll/jekyll jekyll build

We are additionally mapping /home/docker/vendor/bundle so that any artifacts required by Jekyll need not be downloaded every single time this command is run. Remember, Docker containers do not maintain state. This way, the download happens only the first time.

Output:

ruby 2.6.2p47 (2019-03-13 revision 67232) [x86_64-linux-musl]
Configuration file: /srv/jekyll/_config.yml
            Source: /srv/jekyll
       Destination: /srv/jekyll/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
                    done in 4.51 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: disabled. Use --watch to enable.

Step 3: Serve the pages (which are in _site folder) using jekyll serve

docker run --rm -v //c/Users/vimal/Documents/GitHub/vimal-krishna.github.io:/srv/jekyll 
	-v //home/docker/vendor/bundle:/usr/local/bundle 
	-it -p 4000:4000 jekyll/jekyll jekyll serve --force-polling

Notice that we need to use -p to publish the internal port 4000 so that the server is accessible from a browser. You can access the Jekyll site at http://localhost:4000 The pages will be served as long as the Docker container is running.

Output:

ruby 2.6.2p47 (2019-03-13 revision 67232) [x86_64-linux-musl]
Configuration file: /srv/jekyll/_config.yml
            Source: /srv/jekyll
       Destination: /srv/jekyll/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
                    done in 4.52 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/srv/jekyll'
    Server address: http://0.0.0.0:4000/
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.