Jekyll in Docker

Recently I’ve been playing around with Jekyll to create some simple websites. I’ve used Jekyll in the past and I remember that the set-up was a multi-step process.

Jekyll is a Ruby application that uses several Gems and Bundler. That means installing several dependencies. In my case I don’t have a Ruby development environment already set up, so I would have to install all these packages just to use a static site generator.

Then I found the official Jekyll Docker image.

I already have Docker installed to play around with other containers, so downloading a Jekyll container and using it was as easy as:

docker run --rm --label=jekyll --volume=$(pwd):/srv/jekyll \
  -it -p 127.0.0.1:4000:4000 jekyll/jekyll jekyll serve

That’s all there is to it. This command will download the latest Jekyll image and start serving your site. No need to install Ruby, Gem, Bundler, or a bunch of other dependencies.