Jekyll - My First Steps
First Project
I’ve been exploring different ways to host and customize static sites. Recently, I decided to dive into Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator that can take your markdown and generate static webpages..
I thought the best way to learn would be to clone someone else’s theme and start tinkering. Here’s how that went down.
Cloning the Repo and Setting up Ruby
First, I cloned a theme I liked from GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/prahladyeri/prahladyeri.github.io.git
Since Jekyll requires Ruby, I installed it with Homebrew:
brew install ruby
echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/ruby/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/lib/ruby/gems/3.4.0/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
Then, I installed Jekyll and Bundler:
gem install bundler jekyll
Finally, I fired up the local site:
cd prahladyeri.github.io
jekyll serve --livereload
At this point, everything was running smoothly!
Cleaning Up the Theme
Since I wanted to make the site my own, I did some cleanup: • Deleted all the existing markdown files in the posts folder. • Removed references to the original developer (GitHub profile, custom links, etc.). • Gave it a fresh look with my own branding.
The site looked great—until I clicked on a post. That’s when I hit this error:
“An error occurred: giscus is not installed on this repository”
The “Aha!” Moment: GitHub Apps
After some digging, I learned that Jekyll themes can be configured to use GitHub Apps for features like comments. In this case, the theme was using Giscus, a commenting system that relies on GitHub Discussions.
👉 TLDR: You can actually install apps into GitHub repos!
Docs here: Installing a GitHub App