Create a blog using Jekyll and Minimal Mistakes, hosted on Github Pages

When searching for “create developer blog” you get a ton of hits. Most of them will recommend a hosting company like Medium or DEV or a personal blog option with hosting like Digital Ocean, Blue etc.

A free hosting option is to use GitHub pages. A nice blog site generator that plays well together with GitHub Pages is Jekyll. Jekyll has loads of themes that lets you customize the look of the blog without having to fiddle with CSS.

Jekyll is not officially supported on Windows so I would recommend going with WSL2 in case you’re on a Windows machine.

Setting things up

Here are the steps for how to create a blog site using Jekyll with a nice theme called Minimal Mistakes and host it on Github Pages.

• Follow the Jekyll tutorial in order to get a basic understanding of it.
• Install Jekyll on Ubuntu as described here
• Create a public repository on GitHub named <your-github-username>.github.io
• Clone the newly created repository to your local machine.
• To start with a nice template, copy the contents of Minimal Mistakes remote theme starter into your cloned repository.
• Now change the contents and the configuration of the site to your liking.
• Start a local instance of the site with bundle exec jekyll serve

Using a custom domain name

When you push your code to GitHub it will automatically build and publish your site to https://<your-github-username>.github.io. If you want use a custom domain like mysuperduperblog.com, follow these steps:

• Register your domain mysuperduperblog.com at a domain registrar.
• Go to your repo <your-github-username>.github.io and then to Settings -> Pages -> Custom domain and type your custom domain. Then click Save.
• Create an A record with your DNS service that points your domain (e.g. mysuperduperblog.com) to the Github Pages’ IP addresses:
  185.199.108.153
  185.199.109.153
  185.199.110.153
  185.199.111.153
• To have a subdomain such as www.mysuperduperblog.com configure a CNAME record at your DNS service. It should point the subdomain to <your-github-username>.github.io.

If you’ve followed these steps you should now have your blog at your chosen domain.