Getting started

Want to learn more about Jekyll? Check out this tutorial. Why Jekyll? Read Andrej Karpathy's blog post!

Installation

For a hands-on walkthrough of al-folio installation, check out this cool video tutorial by one of the community members! 🎬 🍿

The preferred way of using this template is by clicking in Use this template above the file list. Then, create a new repository at github.com:<your-username>/<your-repo-name>. If you plan to upload your site to <your-github-username>.github.io, note that the name of your repository must be <your-github-username>.github.io or <your-github-orgname>.github.io, as stated in the GitHub pages docs. For more information on how to deploy your site, check the Deployment section below. After you created your new repository, just download it to your machine:

$ git clone [email protected]:<your-username>/<your-repo-name>.git
$ cd <your-repo-name>

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Local setup using Docker (Recommended)

Using Docker to install Jekyll and Ruby dependencies is the easiest way.

You need to take the following steps to get al-folio up and running on your local machine:

• First, install docker and docker-compose.
• Finally, run the following command that will pull the latest pre-built image from DockerHub and will run your website.

$ docker compose pull
$ docker compose up

Note that when you run it for the first time, it will download a docker image of size 400MB or so.

Now, feel free to customize the theme however you like (don't forget to change the name!). After you are done, you can use the same command (docker compose up) to render the webpage with all you changes. Also, make sure to commit your final changes.

To change port number, you can edit docker-compose.yml file.

(click to expand) Build your own docker image:

Note: this approach is only necessary if you would like to build an older or very custom version of al-folio.

Build and run a new docker image using:

$ docker compose up --build

If you want to update jekyll, install new ruby packages, etc., all you have to do is build the image again using --force-recreate argument at the end of the previous command! It will download Ruby and Jekyll and install all Ruby packages again from scratch.

If you want to use a specific docker version, you can do so by changing latest tag to your_version in docker-compose.yaml. For example, you might have created your website on v0.10.0 and you want to stick with that.

• Beta You can also change the docker image tag to slim! It is a slimmed docker image with a size of below 100MBs (same functionality).

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Local Setup (Legacy)

Assuming you have Ruby and Bundler installed on your system (hint: for ease of managing ruby gems, consider using rbenv), and also Python and pip (hint: for ease of managing python packages, consider using a virtual environment, like venv or conda. If you will use only jupyter, you can use pipx).

$ bundle install
# assuming pip is your Python package manager
$ pip install jupyter
$ bundle exec jekyll serve --lsi

Now, feel free to customize the theme however you like (don't forget to change the name!). After you are done, commit your final changes.

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Deployment

Deploying your website to GitHub Pages is the most popular option. Starting version v0.3.5, al-folio will automatically re-deploy your webpage each time you push new changes to your repository! ✨

For personal and organization webpages:

1. The name of your repository MUST BE <your-github-username>.github.io or <your-github-orgname>.github.io.
2. In _config.yml, set url to https://<your-github-username>.github.io and leave baseurl empty.
3. Set up automatic deployment of your webpage (see instructions below).
4. Make changes, commit, and push!
5. After deployment, the webpage will become available at <your-github-username>.github.io.

For project pages:

1. In _config.yml, set url to https://<your-github-username>.github.io and baseurl to /<your-repository-name>/.
2. Set up automatic deployment of your webpage (see instructions below).
3. Make changes, commit, and push!
4. After deployment, the webpage will become available at <your-github-username>.github.io/<your-repository-name>/.

To enable automatic deployment:

1. Click on Actions tab and Enable GitHub Actions; do not worry about creating any workflows as everything has already been set for you.
2. Go to Settings -> Actions -> General -> Workflow permissions, and give Read and write permissions to GitHub Actions
3. Make any other changes to your webpage, commit, and push. This will automatically trigger the Deploy action.
4. Wait for a few minutes and let the action complete. You can see the progress in the Actions tab. If completed successfully, in addition to the master branch, your repository should now have a newly built gh-pages branch.
5. Finally, in the Settings of your repository, in the Pages section, set the branch to gh-pages (NOT to master). For more details, see Configuring a publishing source for your GitHub Pages site.

If you keep your site on another branch, open .github/workflows/deploy.yml on the branch you keep your website on and change on->push->branches and on->pull_request->branches to the branch you keep your website on. This will trigger the action on pulls/pushes on that branch. The action will then deploy the website on the branch it was triggered from.

(click to expand) Manual deployment to GitHub Pages:

If you need to manually re-deploy your website to GitHub pages, go to Actions, click "Deploy" in the left sidebar, then "Run workflow."

(click to expand) Deployment to another hosting server (non GitHub Pages):

If you decide to not use GitHub Pages and host your page elsewhere, simply run:

$ bundle exec jekyll build --lsi

which will (re-)generate the static webpage in the _site/ folder. Then simply copy the contents of the _site/ directory to your hosting server.

If you also want to remove unused css classes from your file, run:

$ purgecss -c purgecss.config.js

which will replace the css files in the _site/assets/css/ folder with the purged css files.

Note: Make sure to correctly set the url and baseurl fields in _config.yml before building the webpage. If you are deploying your webpage to your-domain.com/your-project/, you must set url: your-domain.com and baseurl: /your-project/. If you are deploying directly to your-domain.com, leave baseurl blank.

(click to expand) Deployment to a separate repository (advanced users only):

Note: Do not try using this method unless you know what you are doing (make sure you are familiar with publishing sources). This approach allows to have the website's source code in one repository and the deployment version in a different repository.

Let's assume that your website's publishing source is a publishing-source subdirectory of a git-versioned repository cloned under $HOME/repo/. For a user site this could well be something like $HOME/<user>.github.io.

Firstly, from the deployment repo dir, checkout the git branch hosting your publishing source.

Then from the website sources dir (commonly your al-folio fork's clone):

$ bundle exec jekyll build --lsi --destination $HOME/repo/publishing-source

This will instruct jekyll to deploy the website under $HOME/repo/publishing-source.

Note: Jekyll will clean $HOME/repo/publishing-source before building!

The quote below is taken directly from the jekyll configuration docs:

Destination folders are cleaned on site builds

The contents of <destination> are automatically cleaned, by default, when the site is built. Files or folders that are not created by your site will be removed. Some files could be retained by specifying them within the <keep_files> configuration directive.

Do not use an important location for <destination>; instead, use it as a staging area and copy files from there to your web server.

If $HOME/repo/publishing-source contains files that you want jekyll to leave untouched, specify them under keep_files in _config.yml. In its default configuration, al-folio will copy the top-level README.md to the publishing source. If you want to change this behavior, add README.md under exclude in _config.yml.

Note: Do not run jekyll clean on your publishing source repo as this will result in the entire directory getting deleted, irrespective of the content of keep_files in _config.yml.

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Upgrading from a previous version

If you installed al-folio as described above, you can configure a GitHub action to automatically sync your repository with the latest version of the theme.

Go to Settings -> Actions -> General -> Workflow permissions, give Read and write permissions to GitHub Actions, check "Allow GitHub Actions to create and approve pull requests", and save your changes.

Then go to Actions -> New workflow -> set up a workflow yourself, setup the following workflow and commit your changes:

name: Sync from template
on:
    # cronjob trigger
  schedule:
  - cron:  "0 0 1 * *"
  # manual trigger
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  repo-sync:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # To use this repository's private action, you must check out the repository
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: actions-template-sync
        uses: AndreasAugustin/[email protected]
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          source_repo_path: alshedivat/al-folio
          upstream_branch: master

You will receive a pull request within your repository if there are some changes available in the template.

Another option is to manually update your code by following the steps below:

# Assuming the current directory is <your-repo-name>
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/alshedivat/al-folio.git
$ git fetch upstream
$ git rebase v0.9.0

If you have extensively customized a previous version, it might be trickier to upgrade. You can still follow the steps above, but git rebase may result in merge conflicts that must be resolved. See git rebase manual and how to resolve conflicts for more information. If rebasing is too complicated, we recommend re-installing the new version of the theme from scratch and port over your content and changes from the previous version manually.

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Atom (RSS-like) Feed

It generates an Atom (RSS-like) feed of your posts, useful for Atom and RSS readers. The feed is reachable simply by typing after your homepage /feed.xml. E.g. assuming your website mountpoint is the main folder, you can type yourusername.github.io/feed.xml

Related posts

By default, there will be a related posts section on the bottom of the blog posts. These are generated by selecting the max_related most recent posts that share at least min_common_tags tags with the current post. If you do not want to display related posts on a specific post, simply add related_posts: false to the front matter of the post. If you want to disable it for all posts, simply set enabled to false in the related_blog_posts section in _config.yml.

License

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Originally, al-folio was based on the *folio theme (published by Lia Bogoev and under the MIT license). Since then, it got a full re-write of the styles and many additional cool features.