Blogging with JBake and GitHub Pages

Welcome to the new blog

First of all a great thanks to Mac for steering me in the direction of JBake. His blog inspired me to spend the time and implement my own version.

I’m not going to spend a long time on this because there is a plethora of information online - rather I will add tips here and links to the resources I used.

How to do it….

Here’s a list of tools you will need to follow along:

Use GVM to install Gradle and JBake latest. This will save you a lot of manual installation. Sorry Windows people, but you will have to install manually unless you use Cygwin and GVM.

Follow the instructions on the Git website to install Git.

Set up a GitHub Pages Project

Tip	Resource Github - Creating Project Pages manually

Create a new repository on GitHub - I called mine blog.
Make a fresh clone
Create a gh-pages branch - this must be an orphaned branch. Follow the steps in the link above.

The rest ….

Tip	Resource Authoring your blog on GitHub with JBake and Gradle

Note	As of writing this blog the `publish` task is now renamed to `publishGhPages`

To finish off this project I followed Cédric’s tutorial shown in the link above. However, rather than have 2 separate build files I opted for a single build script. I didn’t notice any of the classpath issues that Cédric has raised in his post.

My build file:

buildscript {
  repositories {
      jcenter()
  }

  dependencies {
    classpath 'me.champeau.gradle:jbake-gradle-plugin:0.2'

    // optional, if you use asciidoctor markup
    classpath 'org.asciidoctor:asciidoctor-java-integration:0.1.4'

    // optional, if you use freemarker template engine
    classpath 'org.freemarker:freemarker:2.3.19'

    classpath 'org.ajoberstar:gradle-git:0.12.0'
  }
}

apply plugin: 'me.champeau.jbake'
apply plugin: 'org.ajoberstar.github-pages'

githubPages {
  repoUri = 'git@github.com:willis7/blog.git'
  pages {
    from(file('build/jbake')) {
      into '.'
    }
  }
}

Note	I’m using the SSH communication protocol with GitHub. I did try simple authentication, but had problems and switched to SSH. Theres a great tutorial by Atlassian that guides you through the steps. Whilst it is for Bitbucket, the steps are relevant to GitHub.

Conclusion

For the amount of blogging that I do, I guess it begs the question why I would switch from blogger. Well, the truth is it was more about the challenge and the learning. When I originally opened my blog it was intended to be a personal reminder of problems I encountered and the solutions I found. If someone got benefit from them, then that’s even better.

So far I have enjoyed the flexibility brought through the use of JBake. I can play with many template engines, explore CSS and JS all within the confines of my own blog. Also, as I’m using Git if I stuff something up I can always revert back to a working version.

A pleasurable experience in all. Easy to get started too!