Let’s say we’re building a personal blog under my github account chantil and the blog’s url would be http://chantil.github.io/. So the very first step is to set up a repository chantil.github.io.

Then we only need few steps to make the blog run on local server.

$ gem install jekyll bundler   # install bundler and Jekyll
$ jekyll chantil.github.io     # create a new site
$ cd chantil.github.io
$ bundle exec jekyll serve     # run on local server

Voilà! Now we can see a website on http://127.0.0.1:4000/ with merely FOUR commands.

Next step, we’re gonna customize the site to make it look like ours.

_config.yml

Go to _config.yml to edit fields and comment fields that we don’t want. In our case, it would look like

title: Chantil's Blog
description: >-
  I cannot come up with a decent description. 
baseurl: ""
url: "https://chantil.github.io"

DO NOT remove/comment title or description because we’re using default theme minima which requires these fields to be filled in _config.yml.

Make sure to run bundle exec jekyll serve to see the change after editing _config.yml.

about.md

Modify about.md to edit the content of page /about.

_posts

As you can see, there’s a _posts folder in the main directory. To add new post, add a file in the _posts folder that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.md.

Gemfile

Since we will serve the blog on GitHub Pages, we only need the following lines in Gemfile to keep gems align with GitHub’s.

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "github-pages", group: :jekyll_plugins

Then run bundle update to update gems.

At this point, everything is pretty much all set. The last thing we need to do is push all commits we’ve done to the remote repository. JUST MAKE SURE YOU STAY AT BRANCH master.

Now it’s all done. Type your expected url in the browser, you’ll see it launched to the whole world!

This tutorial is only for building up a blog in few minutes, so if you