How to Create a GitBook Style with Jekyll

Jan 23, 2024 | Programming

Are you dreaming of transforming your Jekyll site into a polished GitBook-style platform? Look no further! This guide will walk you through the essentials of setting up a GitBook look using the Jekyll Gitbook theme. With intuitive features and user-friendly instructions, you will soon impress your readers with a structure that’s as appealing as it is functional.

Why Jekyll with GitBook?

Jekyll combined with GitBook offers a fantastic frontend style to showcase and organize content, like book chapters or blogs, online. Typically, deploying a GitBook on GitHub Pages involves building HTML files locally and pushing them to your GitHub repository, generally to the gh-pages branch. This process can become tedious and complicate version control.

The Jekyll Gitbook theme simplifies this by separating style definitions from generated HTML, allowing you to deploy your site to GitHub Pages without the hassle of regenerating and uploading HTML files after each change. Let’s dive into how to get started!

How to Get Started

Follow these simple steps to introduce the Jekyll Gitbook theme to your own site:

  • Fork this repository and add your markdown posts to the _posts folder.
  • Use it as a remote theme in your _config.yml by adding the following line:
  • remote_theme: sighingnow/jekyll-gitbook

Deploy Locally with Jekyll Serve

To run this theme locally, you will need Ruby and Gemfiles. Follow the guide on GitHub to test your site locally with Jekyll.

Full-text Search

The search functionality in the Jekyll Gitbook theme is powered by the gitbook-plugin-search-pro, enabled by default. You can see it in action here.

The Beauty of Code Highlight

Code highlighting can easily be customized. The default style is colorful, but you can choose from several styles supported in the rouge repository.

To modify the style, update your _config.yaml with:

syntax_highlighter_style: colorful

Generating a Table of Contents (TOC)

The theme leverages jekyll-toc to generate a Table of Contents for your pages. To enable this feature, modify your _config.yml:

toc:
  enabled: true
  h_min: 1
  h_max: 3

Utilizing Google Analytics and Other Tools

Want to set up Google Analytics, CNZZ, or Application Insights? It’s as simple as adding the following minimal configuration into your _config.yaml:

tracker:
  google_analytics: YOUR GOOGLE ANALYTICS KEY, e.g., UA-xxxxxx-x

Make sure to replace the placeholder with your actual Google Analytics key.

Adding Comments with Disqus

If you wish to enable comments, integrate Disqus by adding the following to your _config.yaml:

disqushandler: YOUR DISQUS SHORTNAME

Advanced Customization Options

The theme supports Jekyll’s collections to manage pages more effectively and allows extra stylesheets or JavaScripts. You can explore this further by modifying the following keys in your configuration:

  • extra_css: for additional stylesheets
  • extra_header_js: for scripts in the head tag
  • extra_footer_js: for scripts at the end of the document

Troubleshooting Tips

If your site doesn’t display as expected or if there are issues with deployment, consider the following:

  • Ensure that your _config.yml is properly formatted; YAML is sensitive to indentation.
  • Reconfirm your repository and GitHub settings are correctly configured.
  • Clear your browser cache to see the latest version of your site.

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Customization and Enhancements

For additional customizations, you can modify font settings, enable diagram rendering with mermaid.js, and more. These features can be easily enabled within your configuration files.

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Conclusion

Transforming your Jekyll site into a GitBook style is now at your fingertips! With the steps outlined above, you’ll soon enjoy a visually appealing and organized platform to host your content.

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