TL;DR

If Preview for Jekyll blog on GitHub Pages was a neat hack, but you feel like something less… “open”, testing out new posts locally is probably the only way. Here’s how, in pure Try with Docker spirit.

So, if you want to look at the posts locally before pushing them, you need Jekyll but - if you’re like me - you don’t want to install it. Docker to the rescue!

Well, yes… there is the jekyll image in the Docker Hub, but I’ve not been able to make it work for this blog. I take full responsibility for this, of course.

This is why I decided to roll my own - you can find it in GitLab as dokyll. If you have read something in this blog, you can safely bet that it’s a dibs project.

The installation process follows the one from jekyll prettly closely. Calling it still has some… rough edges, but it’s workable:

$ docker run --rm registry.gitlab.com/polettix/dokyll
cannot associate id '0' to 'jekyll' in '/etc/passwd'

This is suexec complaining - it’s a long story, the bottom line is that you SHOULD pass the current directory for bind-mounting over /mnt, and you will get some help:

$ docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/mnt" registry.gitlab.com/polettix/dokyll
Build the bundle cache:

    mkdir -p _bundle
    docker run --rm \
       -v "$PWD:/mnt" \
       -v "$PWD/_bundle:/usr/local/bundle" \
       registry.gitlab.com/polettix/dokyll \
       bundle install


Build the site, continuously:

    MULTICONFIG=''
    # MULTICONFIG='--config _config.yml,_local_config.yml'
    docker run --rm \
       -v "$PWD:/mnt" \
       -v "$PWD/_bundle:/usr/local/bundle" \
       registry.gitlab.com/polettix/dokyll \
       bundle exec jekyll build $MULTICONFIG --watch


Serve the site (only):

    MULTICONFIG=''
    # MULTICONFIG='--config _config.yml,_local_config.yml'
    docker run --rm \
       -p 4000:4000 \
       -v "$PWD:/mnt" \
       -v "$PWD/_bundle:/usr/local/bundle" \
       registry.gitlab.com/polettix/dokyll \
       bundle exec jekyll serve $MULTICONFIG \
       --no-watch --skip-initial-build --host=0.0.0.0

It’s really just copy-paste, but…

• I keep a _bundle cache of compiled extensions, so the first command allows me to get that started with bundle install;

• using the trick explained here, I keep the site regenerating over and over with bundle exec jekyll build ..., and serve it without generating it with bundle exec jekyll serve .... That’s a super-neat trick that is a MUST when running Jekyll from a Docker container.