After switching to github pages from blogger.com, I really enjoy the ease of using markdown to create my blog posts. But there was still room for improvement. Combining jekyll and livereload now provides almost instant feedback during editing. I found that this is invaluable to me and would like to share the configuration with you.

Jekyll's built-in server already regenerates the site if a source file changes. The other part of my setup is the guard-livereload plugin. The guard process watches for the changes of a jekyll build and will notify livereload after the site has been regenerated.

As I am using bundler to manage the required dependencies, the Gemfile now includes jekyll itself and guard - plus some utilities to improve the experience on Windows platforms.

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem 'jekyll'
gem 'wdm', '>= 0.1.0' if Gem.win_platform?  # native poll for jekyll serve
gem 'guard'
gem 'win32console' if Gem.win_platform?     # colored guard console
gem 'guard-livereload'

Guard and its plugins are configured in the Guardfile. I instruct the livereload plugin to watch the output folder of jekyll.

guard 'livereload' do
  watch /_site/
end

When editing the page both the jekyll server and guard watcher must run to receive live feedback. I am using a powershell script to conveniently start them in parallel. Note that jekyll is configured to render draft posts.

Start-Process bundle -ArgumentList "exec jekyll serve --drafts --watch"
Start-Process bundle -ArgumentList "exec guard"

Finally I exclude the configuration files from jekyll builds in _config.yml.

exclude: ['Gemfile*', 'Guardfile', '*.ps1' ]

You can see the whole setup of my blog in its github repository.