Jekyll 1.0: the static site generator that invented GitHub Pages

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From Rails blog to minimum tool

Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, creates Jekyll in 2008 for his personal blog. In 2009 Jekyll is published open source; in 2013 the 1.0 version is released (25 May 2013), stabilised and made reference tool.

Jekyll is written in Ruby, MIT licence. Generates static HTML from Markdown + Liquid templates.

_posts/
  2013-05-25-welcome.md
_layouts/
  default.html
  post.html
_config.yml

Features

• Markdown + YAML frontmatter for content
• Liquid templating (inherited from Shopify)
• Blog-aware — posts, categories, tags, permalink patterns
• Collections — generalisation of posts for documentation, portfolio
• Data files (_data/*.yml) — structured content
• Plugin system (Ruby gems)
• Integrated Sass

GitHub Pages

The real success of Jekyll is the native integration with GitHub Pages (2008): push to gh-pages branch → automatic build → free hosting. Millions of developers have their Jekyll blog/portfolio on *.github.io.

Famous themes

• Minimal Mistakes (Michael Rose)
• Just the Docs — documentation
• Hydejack
• Chirpy

Limits

• Ruby dependency — bundle install, complex gem versioning
• Speed — slow on sites with thousands of pages
• Build time grows with content

Hugo (2013, Go) and 11ty (2018, Node) are born as faster alternatives.

Evolution

• 2.0 (May 2014) — collections, native Sass/CoffeeScript
• 3.0 (October 2015) — incremental regeneration
• 4.0 (August 2019) — Ruby 2.4+
• 4.3 (January 2023) — Ruby 3 compatibility

GitHub Pages continues to use Jekyll as default engine in 2026.

In the Italian context

Jekyll was the first contact with static site generators for many Italian developers. Used for:

• Personal tech blogs on GitHub Pages
• Italian open source community sites
• Open source project documentation
• Event sites (conferences, user groups)

Over time replaced by Hugo, Astro, 11ty for new projects, but still present on many historical Italian blogs.

References: Jekyll 1.0 (25 May 2013). Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub. MIT licence. Ruby + Liquid + Markdown. Integrated in GitHub Pages (2008). Current version 4.3 (2023).