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 (8 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.ymlFeatures
- 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) is born as a faster Go-based alternative.
What’s next
The 1.0 marks a stability milestone after two years of 0.x versions. The community’s next expected step is the introduction of collections to type content beyond blog posts.
In the Italian context
Jekyll is the first contact with static site generators for many Italian developers. It’s used for:
- Personal tech blogs on GitHub Pages
- Italian Open Source community sites
- Open Source project documentation
- Event sites (conferences, user groups)
References: Jekyll 1.0 (8 May 2013). Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub. MIT licence. Ruby + Liquid + Markdown. Integrated in GitHub Pages (2008).