Migrate blog from GitHub Pages to Netlify

Introduction

Recently I have changed from Hexo to Jekyll to generate my website, as describted in my last post. For writing post with Jekyll, the Jekyll plugin jekyll-postfiles is very handy. It can copy files in the post directory to the right place in the site build, so that image or file links, e.g. ![fig](fig.png) in post markdown, works after converting to HTML. This gets me rid of saving images/files into separate assets folder and specifying the long links. It meanwhile keeps the original ![](/assets/fig.png) way to refer to assets. One needs to add following to Gemfile to install this plugin

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem 'jekyll'

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'jekyll-postfiles'
end

My current site is built and deployed on GitHub Pages through page action. However, the author of jekyll-postfiles suggests that GitHub Pages doesn’t support thirt-party plugins. I guess the page action will check :jekyll_plugins in the Gemfile and will fail if any. Searching on Google gives me an impression that few tries to use jekyll-postfiles with GitHub Pages.

To use jekyll-postfiles for remote building, use of site services is suggested. I decide to give Netlify a shot. I have actually opened a Netlify account quite a while before by connecting to my GitHub account, when I saw one of my friends deploying his site there.

Below is a quick memo for myself of the migration process.

Update setting of repository

• Change the Website in the repository details (the gear near About)
• Stop building from action in Setting: in Actions->General tab, select Disable actions
• To make sure that the page will not be built, in Pages tab of Setting, select “Deploy from a branch” for source, and select None as branch.

Handle Gem dependencies

Chirpy theme itself has a Gemfile and install its dependencies through gemspec command. In jekyll-theme-chirpy.gemspec, jekyll is mentioned as a runtime dependency. Thus simply adding the plugin somewhere in Gemfile should suffice.

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'jekyll-postfiles'
end

Then commit this change and push to GitHub.

Set new site on Netlify

On Netlify, import the blog project by “Add new site”. Connect to the GitHub account, choose the site repository. Netlify is clever enough to find that this is a Jekyll website, and reminds me of missing the jekyll dependency in Gemfile. However, this can be safely ignored, since jekyll is handled in the gemspec file as mentioned above.

In the build setting session, change the command to jekyll build and click “Deploy site”. Since the site is still rather small, the build finishes only in a minute. A random name will be dispatched to the site. Go to “Site setting” tab of the site project, click “Change site name” and type in a meaningful site name. For my case, the site name is minyez, making the website minyez.netlify.app.

I am not bothering with custom domain at present.

Summary

Migrating from GitHub Pages to Netlify appears to be very straightforward under the Chirpy theme. With jekyll-postfiles plugin, refering to images and files becomes very intuitive, which makes me look forward to future writing.

References

The official site provides a rather old tutorial for migrating from GitHub Pages. It basically works for me as of the writing, while it seems not necessary to include full github-pages gem or have a .ruby-version file.