How to create on-demand environments for Jekyll sites

“See how your Jekyll site and articles look like before you publish them.”

Want to see how your site will turn out before you publish? Just open a PR on your repo and Dockup will spin up a live site for you!

Assuming that you have a Jekyll blog in place, let’s see how we can dockerise it and create a Dockup Blueprint. Here’s the Jekyll site we’ll use: Minima.

We’ll add a couple of files to the root directory:

1. Dockerfile to build the docker image of our site.
2. nginx.conf to serve the static site using Nginx.

Dockerfile and Nginx sample config

Create Blueprint

Now that we have a Dockerfile added to the source, let’s create a Dockup Blueprint.

Make sure you have configured you GitHub account with Dockup. If you haven’t done it yet, you can head over to Dockup Settings

Container for Jekyll

And that’s all! Wasn’t that easy?

Now every time you open a pull request, Dockup will stage that branch and give you a new deployment as shown below:

Deployed successfully

You can follow similar steps to create on-demand environments for other static site generators, say for e.g. Hugo.

Would you like to test it out on your blog? Click here to get started.