There are a number of inaccuracies in GitHub’s guide for setting up GitHub Pages with Jekyll. For those looking to get a Jekyll site running on Ubuntu, these pointers that supplement and correct the guide should help. I will follow the same headings and step numbers as on the page above, but won’t reproduce that page in its entirety, so this guide must be used in conjunction with that one.

Prerequisites

It is pretty ambiguous how to satisfy the dependencies from the GitHub guide. The concise and complete guide for Ubuntu is instead on Jekyll’s page: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/installation/ubuntu/

Creating a repository for your site

Again, it is not very clear what needs to be done to get a personal page from this section, especially if you are not using an existing repository for a project. Skip the paragraphs at the top, and follow the numbered steps. Create a repository on GitHub, and for the name of the repository use the format <github_username>.github.io (e.g. for my case, bielsnohr.github.io).

Creating your site

2) For my personal website, I chose my PARENT-FOLDER to be ~/sites/.

3) Continuing with my own example git init bielsnohr.github.io. Good practice to match repository name on local machine with the GitHub one.

4) Use the master branch of your new repository since this is a personal page.

6) Don’t need to navigate anywhere because the site source will live at the top level of the master branch.

7) This is where the guide is really inaccurate. The new jekyll site is initiated simply with the command

jekyll new .

(from within your local repository directory). The version is then specified in the Gemfile once it is created, so make sure to edit it with the line:

gem "jekyll", "~> 3.8.5"

To start using this version, do bundle update.

8) Once again, the instructions were inaccurate for installing the github-pages gem. Change the Gemfile as instructed, but run bundle update instead of bundle update github-pages since github-pages has not been installed yet and other dependencies need to be updated.

13) There is a critical step missing before this one! If you are creating a new repository, then all of the new content needs to be added and committed. From within the local repository working, execute git add -A . and then push to the remote directory as instructed in this step.

That should be your blog sorted now! The GitHub references for adding content and viewing your page locally are all accurate from my experience, so consult those to get blogging.