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Ask HN: Is Jekyll on GitHub a good solution for hosting a website?

by devShark on 2/23/22, 6:04 PM with 16 comments

I need to build a simple website to share a project that I have, that evolves around advocating for some social change, and involves open source code.

My initial thought was to use a simple website builder like Wix or squarespace, and include a forum plugin to try and create a community.

The main reason I thought about this instead of wordpress is because I do not want the hassle of having to update the code every now and then. These website builders are very secure, as far as I know.

However, I stumbled upon the option of hosting a static website on github pages, using jekyll, and using github discussions as a forum.

Can anyone opine on whether that's a good idea? Specifically, can I be very confident that there is no security flaw, and that I have no requirement to update my code, as long as it's hosted on github pages?

Any advice and comment welcome, thanks!

  • by jasone on 2/23/22, 6:49 PM

    I have found Jekyll on GitHub to be a pretty good solution overall. I put this Makefile in the git repo to make my workflow simple:

    https://gist.github.com/jasone/b0208286b44208b705156fdf046ca...

    The one issue I'm frustrated with is that syntax highlighting for code blocks depends on GitHub's blessing:

    https://github.com/github/linguist/issues/2598

    For example, this page from my blog highlights OCaml code, but not the language I'm developing (Hemlock):

    https://branchtaken.com/blog/2021/11/15/string-formatting-in...

    Given the low likelihood of Hemlock sweeping the software world before this becomes a critical presentation issue, I'm probably going to switch my publication workflow to pre-generate html.

  • by davidclark22 on 2/23/22, 6:38 PM

    I've used Jekyll on GitHub for several simple landing pages over the years. My experience has been great. The pages are always up, have SSL, load quickly, and don't really require maintenance.

  • by imagetic on 2/23/22, 6:33 PM

    For hassle free website/pages, I've been really liking https://gohugo.io cause there aren't dependencies or complex setups/installs. The template system had a bit of a learning curve.

    Netlify and Cloudflare also have free hosting tiers you can deploy with.

    https://www.netlify.com https://www.cloudflare.com

  • by Saturdays on 2/23/22, 8:51 PM

    I used Hugo+Git+Netlify and it worked well, however its a pain to create a custom template that I love - I'm in the process of switching to Wordpress+Elementor, just because I'm taking a more visual approach to building now and am a bit lazy with trying to manage my own design system and all that...

    That being said, there's nothing wrong with Hugo or other static site generators, and they are crazy fast and mostly hands-off once you got what you need.

  • by rurban on 2/23/22, 8:28 PM

    Yes, it is. It's also the fastest and best available free website offering.

    Just Jekyll could be replaced by Hugo, if you care enough. This has much more features.

  • by atomashpolskiy on 2/23/22, 9:58 PM

    Yes, I use Jekyll as gh-pages -- to host the website for my OSS project on github. It fits this purpose perfectly.

  • by nittanymount on 2/23/22, 6:21 PM

    for your purpose, github pages/wiki + repo issues along with your code, that will be pretty good, maybe get a domain name for it... would not bother to use another site...

  • by aprdm on 2/23/22, 6:21 PM

    yes that's a good solution, a lot of people do it.