Preview GitHub Pages on Windows 10 with Vagrant

I was looking for a way to work with Jekyll in my Windows 10 box in order to preview my blog before committing to GitHub. I found that setting up Jekyll on Windows is a little tricky so I was looking for a way to run it using Vagrant. Searching on Google I found the jsturtevant/jekyll-vagrant project by James Sturtevant that fits perfectly my need. The project has a related post: Running Jekyll in Windows where James describes his solution.

Here are the steps you need to start working with Jekyll and Vagrant as depicted by James in his post.

Setup

  1. Install Vagrant and Virtual Box. If you need help you can read this post: Getting Started with Vagrant on Windows.

  2. Clone the jekyll-vagrant repository

    git clone https://github.com/jsturtevant/jekyll-vagrant.git

  3. Open command prompt to location of the vagrantfile in the new cloned repository and run vagrant up

  4. Jekyll and all it’s dependencies are installed!

Existing Jekyll Projects

  1. Copy the projects folder to the folder that contains the vagrantfile.
  2. Login to the VM using vagrant ssh

New Jekyll Projects

  1. Open a command prompt to location of the vagrantfile and run vagrant ssh
  2. Once in the VM prompt cd /vagrant
  3. Create a new site with jekyll new <sitename>

Start the Site

  1. In the VM prompt cd /vagrant/<YourProjectFolder>
  2. Start the Jekyll server jekyll serve --force_polling --host 0.0.0.0 (force polling is required with vagrant because of share)
  3. On your host machine you can open any browser and navigate to localhost:4000
  4. Work on you project on your host machine and see updates as they happen on localhost:4000

James has also made experiments with Docker that he describes in this post: Running Jekyll in Windows Using Docker.

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