Setting a Markdown processor for your GitHub Pages site using Jekyll

You can choose a Markdown processor to determine how Markdown is rendered on your GitHub Pages site.

Who can use this feature?

GitHub Pages is available in public repositories with GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations, and in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see GitHub’s plans.

GitHub Pages now uses GitHub Actions to execute the Jekyll build. When using a branch as the source of your build, GitHub Actions must be enabled in your repository if you want to use the built-in Jekyll workflow. Alternatively, if GitHub Actions is unavailable or disabled, adding a .nojekyll file to the root of your source branch will bypass the Jekyll build process and deploy the content directly. For more information on enabling GitHub Actions, see Managing GitHub Actions settings for a repository.

People with write permissions for a repository can set the Markdown processor for a GitHub Pages site.

GitHub Pages supports two Markdown processors: kramdown and GitHub's own Markdown processor, which is used to render GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) throughout GitHub. For more information, see About writing and formatting on GitHub.

You can use GitHub Flavored Markdown with either processor.

  1. On GitHub, navigate to your site's repository.

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

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

    Screenshot of a file. In the header, a button, labeled with a pencil icon, is outlined in dark orange.

    Note

    Instead of editing and committing the file using the default file editor, you can optionally choose to use the github.dev code editor by selecting the dropdown menu and clicking github.dev. You can also clone the repository and edit the file locally via GitHub Desktop by clicking GitHub Desktop.

    Screenshot of a file. In the header, a downwards-facing triangle icon is outlined in dark orange.

  4. Find the line that starts with markdown: and change the value to kramdown or GFM. The full line should read markdown: kramdown or markdown: GFM.

  5. Click Commit changes...

  6. In the "Commit message" field, 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 authors.

  7. If you have more than one email address associated with your account on GitHub, click the email address drop-down menu and select the email address to use as the Git author email address. Only verified email addresses appear in this drop-down menu. If you enabled email address privacy, then a no-reply will be the default commit author email address. For more information about the exact form the no-reply email address can take, see Setting your commit email address.

    Screenshot of a GitHub pull request showing a dropdown menu with options to choose the commit author email address. octocat@github.com is selected.

  8. 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 the default branch, you should choose to create a new branch for your commit and then create a pull request. For more information, see Creating a pull request.

    Screenshot of a GitHub pull request showing a radio button to commit directly to the main branch or to create a new branch. New branch is selected.

  9. Click Commit changes or Propose changes.

Further reading