How to run Jekyll locally with Docker and Docker Compose

As I have some free time with the holidays, I decided to do a revamp on my website. After exploring all the new hyped static site generators that are trending now, I decided to continue using Jekyll and GitHub Pages.

As I am totally inexperienced with Ruby, installing the Jekyll environment setup on my machine was always an issue for me, so I decided to just use Docker this time (after struggling for an hour trying to install it locally on my mac). I will quickly describe how I did it.

Docker Compose setup

My plan is to be able to do a docker-compose up to be to run an instance of jekyll serve on my localhost, with all the auto rebuilding and live reloading goodies.

Jekyll has an official docker image, so I created a simple docker-compose.yml file that creates a container with the official image, a volume that maps to the root of my repo and made it execute jekyll serve.

services:
  jekyll:
    image: jekyll/jekyll:latest
    command: jekyll serve --watch --force_polling --verbose --livereload
    ports:
      - 4000:4000
    volumes:
      - .:/srv/jekyll

With this compose file defined, docker-compose up will then serve my website on localhost:4000

Way easier than I expected 🙂