Testing your GitHub Pages site locally with Jekyll

In this article

• Prerequisites
• Building your site locally
• Updating the GitHub Pages gem
• Further reading

Anyone with read permissions for a repository can test a GitHub Pages site locally.

Prerequisites

Before you can use Jekyll to test a site, you must:

• Install Jekyll.
• Create a Jekyll site. For more information, see "Creating a GitHub Pages site with Jekyll."

We recommend using Bundler to install and run Jekyll. Bundler manages Ruby gem dependencies, reduces Jekyll build errors, and prevents environment-related bugs. To install Bundler:

1. Install Ruby. For more information, see "Installing Ruby" in the Ruby documentation.
2. Install Bundler. For more information, see "Bundler."

Building your site locally

1. Open TerminalTerminalGit Bash.

2. Navigate to the publishing source for your site. For more information about publishing sources, see "About GitHub Pages."

3. Run your Jekyll site locally.

   $ bundle exec jekyll serve
   > Configuration file: /Users/octocat/my-site/_config.yml
   >            Source: /Users/octocat/my-site
   >       Destination: /Users/octocat/my-site/_site
   > Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
   >      Generating...
   >                    done in 0.309 seconds.
   > Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/Users/octocat/my-site'
   > Configuration file: /Users/octocat/my-site/_config.yml
   >    Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000/
   >  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

4. To preview your site, in your web browser, navigate to http://localhost:4000.

Updating the GitHub Pages gem

Jekyll is an active open source project that is updated frequently. If the github-pages gem on your computer is out of date with the github-pages gem on the GitHub Pages server, your site may look different when built locally than when published on GitHub Enterprise. To avoid this, regularly update the github-pages gem on your computer.

1. Open TerminalTerminalGit Bash.

2. Update the github-pages gem.

   • If you installed Bundler, run bundle update github-pages.
   • If you don't have Bundler installed, run gem update github-pages.

Further reading

• GitHub Pages in the Jekyll documentation