Basic Usage

The Jekyll gem makes a jekyll executable available to you in your Terminal window. You can use this command in a number of ways:

$ jekyll build
# => The current folder will be generated into ./_site

$ jekyll build --destination <destination>
# => The current folder will be generated into <destination>

$ jekyll build --source <source> --destination <destination>
# => The <source> folder will be generated into <destination>

$ jekyll build --watch
# => The current folder will be generated into ./_site,
#    watched for changes, and regenerated automatically.

Destination folders are cleaned on site builds

The contents of <destination> are automatically cleaned when the site is built. Files or folders that are not created by your site will be removed. Do not use an important location for <destination>; instead, use it as a staging area and copy files from there to your web server.

Jekyll also comes with a built-in development server that will allow you to preview what the generated site will look like in your browser locally.

$ jekyll serve
# => A development server will run at http://localhost:4000/
# Auto-regeneration: enabled. Use `--no-watch` to disable.

$ jekyll serve --detach
# => Same as `jekyll serve` but will detach from the current terminal.
#    If you need to kill the server, you can `kill -9 1234` where "1234" is the PID.
#    If you cannot find the PID, then do, `ps aux | grep jekyll` and kill the instance. [Read more](http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/shell/jobz5.html).

Be aware of default behavior

As of version 2.4, the serve command will watch for changes automatically. To disable this, you can use jekyll serve --no-watch, which preserves the old behavior.

$ jekyll serve --no-watch
# => Same as `jekyll serve` but will not watch for changes.

These are just a few of the available configuration options. Many configuration options can either be specified as flags on the command line, or alternatively (and more commonly) they can be specified in a _config.yml file at the root of the source directory. Jekyll will automatically use the options from this file when run. For example, if you place the following lines in your _config.yml file:

source:      _source
destination: _deploy

Then the following two commands will be equivalent:

$ jekyll build
$ jekyll build --source _source --destination _deploy

For more about the possible configuration options, see the configuration page.

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