Adding a Jekyll theme to your GitHub Pages site

GitHub Pages supports the officially supported Jekyll themes, as well as all open source Jekyll themes hosted on GitHub Enterprise. For more information, see "About Jekyll themes on GitHub."

You can override a Jekyll theme's defaults with your site's content in these folders:

• _layouts
• _includes
• _sass
• assets

For more information about the Jekyll theme files you can override, see your theme's README or other documentation in your theme's source repository.

Adding a Jekyll theme in your site's _config.yml file

1. On GitHub Enterprise, navigate to the main page of the repository.

2. In your repository, browse to _config.yml.

3. In the upper-right corner of the file view, click to open the file editor.

   

4. Activate the theme by adding a new line to your _config.yml with the theme name:

   • To activate one of the officially supported themes, type theme: followed by the name of the theme (as shown in the README in the theme's source repository).
     
   • To activate any other open source Jekyll theme hosted on GitHub Enterprise, type remote_theme: followed by the name of the theme (as shown in the README or other documentation in the theme's source repository).
     

5. At the bottom of the page, type a short, meaningful commit message that describes the change you made to the file. You can attribute the commit to more than one author in the commit message. For more information, see "Creating a commit with multiple co-authors."

   

6. Below the commit message fields, decide whether to add your commit to the current branch or to a new branch. If your current branch is master, you should choose to create a new branch for your commit and then create a pull request.

   

7. Click Propose file change.

   

8. If you created a pull request, merge your pull request into your GitHub Pages publishing branch, which is usually master and sometimes gh-pages.

Your site should now publish with the new theme you added.

Previewing your Jekyll theme locally

After adding a Jekyll theme in your site's _config.yml file on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, you can preview the theme locally by following the steps detailed in the sections below.

Before attempting to preview your Jekyll theme locally, ensure the following:

• You have a local copy of your remote GitHub Pages site repository on your computer. If you don't have a local copy of your site repository, see "Cloning a repository." If you don't have a remote GitHub Pages site repository on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance yet you can use someone else's open source site repository as a starting template and fork it.
• You have Bundler installed.

Adding your theme as a Gem to your Gemfile

1. On GitHub Enterprise, navigate to the main page of the repository.

2. In your repository, browse to Gemfile.

3. In the upper-right corner of the file view, click to open the file editor.

4. Add a new line to your Gemfile with the theme name in quotations:

   

   Tip: You can add multiple Jekyll themes to your Gemfile but to activiate a theme, only one theme can be added to your _config.yml file.

5. At the bottom of the page, type a short, meaningful commit message that describes the change you made to the file. You can attribute the commit to more than one author in the commit message. For more information, see "Creating a commit with multiple co-authors."

   

6. Below the commit message fields, decide whether to add your commit to the current branch or to a new branch. If your current branch is master, you should choose to create a new branch for your commit and then create a pull request.

   

7. Click Propose file change.

   

8. If you created a pull request, merge your pull request into your GitHub Pages publishing branch, which is usually master and sometimes gh-pages. For more information on which branch to publish your site with, see "User, Organization, and Project Pages."

Installing your theme using Bundler

1. Open TerminalTerminalGit Bashthe terminal.

2. Navigate into your local GitHub Pages site repository:

   $ cd my-pages-site-repository

3. Load your changes from your remote site repository on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance to your local site repository:

   $ git pull

   Tip: For more information on using git pull, see "Getting changes from a remote repository."

4. Install your Jekyll theme Gem using Bundler:

   $ bundle install
   > Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/............
   Fetching version metadata from https://rubygems.org/...
   Fetching dependency metadata from https://rubygems.org/..
   Resolving dependencies...
   . . .
   Installing minima 1.0.1
   Using bundler 1.10.6
   Bundle complete! 2 Gemfile dependencies, 54 gems now installed.
   Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

5. Push your changes up to your remote GitHub Pages site repository on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, replacing master in the example below with gh-pages if you use a gh-pages branch to publish your site:

   $ git push origin master

Adding a Jekyll theme on the command line

1. Open TerminalTerminalGit Bashthe terminal.

2. Navigate into your local site repository:

   $ cd my-pages-site-repository

3. To add a theme to your site's Gemfile, open your favorite text editor, such as Atom, and add this line to your Gemfile using your selected theme's name in quotations:

   gem "minima"
   # Minima is a default theme for Jekyll sites.

   Tip: You can add multiple Jekyll themes to your Gemfile but only one of these themes can be added to your _config.yml file to activate your theme.

4. Install your Jekyll theme Gem using Bundler:

   $ bundle install
   > Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/............
   Fetching version metadata from https://rubygems.org/...
   Fetching dependency metadata from https://rubygems.org/..
   Resolving dependencies...
   . . .
   Installing minima 1.0.1
   Using bundler 1.10.6
   Bundle complete! 2 Gemfile dependencies, 54 gems now installed.
   Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

5. To activate your theme, using your favorite text editor, add a new line to your site's _config.yml file with your theme's name:

   theme: minima

6. Add and commit your changes using Git:

   $ git commit -a
   # Adds your changes
   $ git commit -m "added theme to Gemfile & _config.yml"
   # Commits your changes with a commit message

7. Push your changes up to your remote GitHub Pages site repository, replacing master in the example below with gh-pages if you use a gh-pages branch to publish your site::

   $ git push origin master

Your site should now publish with the new theme you added.

Further reading

• Jekyll's official documentation on Themes

• "About Jekyll themes on GitHub"

• "Customizing CSS and HTML in your Jekyll theme"