Article version: Enterprise Server 2.13

This version of GitHub Enterprise will be discontinued on This version of GitHub Enterprise was discontinued on 2019-03-27. No patch releases will be made, even for critical security issues. For better performance, improved security, and new features, upgrade to the latest version of GitHub Enterprise. For help with the upgrade, contact GitHub Enterprise support.

About GitHub Pages and Jekyll

GitHub Pages is available in public repositories with GitHub Free, and in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server.

In addition to supporting regular HTML content, GitHub Pages supports Jekyll, a popular static site generator.

GitHub Pages is deeply integrated with Jekyll, a popular static site generator designed for blogging and software documentation, but used for much more. Jekyll makes it easy to create site-wide headers and footers without having to copy them across every page. It also offers advanced templating features and Jekyll theme support.

Although GitHub Pages was designed to work with any static site generator, using Jekyll offers a lot of built-in support and is the only static site generator GitHub Enterprise officially documents in detail. For more information on how you can use GitHub Pages with another static site generator, see "Using a static site generator other than Jekyll."

The main advantages of Jekyll are:

Jekyll's build process

Jekyll's simplified build process with GitHub Pages is one of the biggest advantages of using Jekyll instead of other static site generators. GitHub Pages manages your site's build process with a single push to your site's publishing branch. This is Jekyll's build process for managing your site:

  1. Push file changes to your pages publishing branch
  2. GitHub Pages publishes your site.

Note: The publishing branch you use depends on the type of GitHub Pages site you have.

Jekyll site examples

Jekyll is the most commonly used static site generator for GitHub Pages. We recommend using Jekyll if you want the built-in support it offers, including the GitHub Pages gem to manage dependencies, specific build failure messages, and more specific help with troubleshooting.

These GitHub showcases include examples of Jekyll sites:

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