Cheap blogging with Jekyll

03 Jan 2021

tl;dr How to host your blog using Jekyll and AWS Amplify

The first thought you might have when you decide to make a blog is “wow I have a big ego”. Your second thought might be “what do I have to write about”.

Well, if your answer is nothing then you can write about how you made a cheap blog. That is what I’ve done. This blog post is about hosting your own cheap blog.

🎯 Prerequisites

1. Github and AWS account
2. Some familiarity with coding and your terminal
3. Homebrew Package Manager

💸 Cost of blogging by platform

At the time of writing (Jan 2021) here are the prices I found online to use your own custom domain (i.e. blancotech.com). Ignoring the price to maintain the domain (I use go daddy and it’s around $20/year)

To be honest, I did this price analysis after and didn’t know Medium was free. Also, I didn’t think to use GitHub. So, do what you like 🤷‍♂️.

⚙️ Setting up Jekyll

Jekyll is a static website and blog framework. It’s easy to get up and running. You can choose custom templates for your blog and easily create new posts using markdown syntax.

I’m using a MacBook on Mac OS Big Sur v11.1. I first tried to follow the instructions on Jekyll’s site https://jekyllrb.com and input them into my terminal

$ gem install bundler jekyll

but this immediately errored

$ gem install bundler jekyll
Fetching bundler-2.2.4.gem
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
You don't have write permissions for the /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.6.0 directory.

I determined it was because I was using the ruby that is native on my Mac OS. To confirm this I checked what my system was using

$ which ruby
/usr/bin/ruby
$ which gem
/usr/bin/gem

To install the latest version of Ruby I used Homebrew

$ brew install ruby

Next, I told my shell environment to use the ruby installed by homebrew. By adding the path to my shell file ~/.zshrc.

$ echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/ruby/bin:/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

Then I refreshed my terminal with the file using $ source ~/.zshrc. Alternatively, you can open a new terminal window and this will do the same thing.

⚠️ If you’re not using ohMyZsh then replace the ~/.zshrc in the above command with ~/.bash_profile.

To confirm that you’re using the brew installed ruby run

$ which ruby
/usr/local/opt/ruby/bin/ruby
$ which gem
/usr/local/opt/ruby/bin/gem

Then running $ gem install bundler jekyll worked 🎉!

🛠 Create your project

To create your project go to the directory you want to create it in. Next, run jekyll new myblog. You can replace myblog with whatever name you’d like to give it.

Run jekyll serve to launch your site and view it in your browser at the URL localhost:4000.

🌐 How to get your code into a repository

In order to get your site online, you’ll need to put your code into a repository. For this, I used GitHub.

1. Go to your GitHub and create a new repository with nothing added to it (no git ignore, etc).
2. Setup the repository by running git init in your project’s directory in your terminal
3. Add the files you will commit by running git add . in your terminal
4. Commit the changed files by runninggit commit -m "My first commit" in your terminal
5. Tell your repository where to push the code by copying the repositories link from GitHub then running $ git remote add origin <your_link> in your terminal. Your link will look something like git@github.com:YourUserName/yourlink.git
6. Finally, push the code by running git push -u origin master

🌐 How to get your site online

So the blog was created! To host it online for the world to access it use AWS Amplify and follow the tutorial here: Deploy your Jekyll Site using AWS Amplify — with only a few clicks.

You now have a blog using Jekyll hosted on AWS Amplify 🍻.