Site configuration

Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 15 min

Questions

• How do you set site wide settings?

Objectives

So we have been able to change some content on the home page generated from the index.md file. However there are still many elements we might like to change on this home page which don’t appear in the index.md file. For example, the FORTY BY HTML5 UP in the top left, or the text under My new site, A RESPONSIVE SITE TEMPLATE .... Where can those items be changed? There are a number of site-wide settings in the _config.yml file we have already briefly looked at in order to configure our site to work with our specific web-server configuration. However, there are many other settings in this _config.yml file which we haven’t looked at yet. Lets see if any of these items are in there.

$ nano _config.yml

# site settings
title: Forty
subtitle: by HTML5 UP
email: youremailaddress@gmail.com
description: A responsive site template designed by HTML5 Up<br /> and released under the Creative Commons.
baseurl: "/<your-username>" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
url: # the base hostname & protocol for your site
author:
street_address: 1234 Somewhere Road
city: Nashville
state: TN
zip_code: 55555
country: United States of America
phone: (716) 555-5555
.
.
.

Ok, we can see those bits of text in this file that we want to change, so lets change them and rebuild our site to see if the update the parts we want. While we are at it, lets put in some other information like our real email address and physical address (not quite my real physical address ;)).

# site settings
title: Awesome Site
subtitle: by Chris Geroux
email: chris.geroux@ace-net.ca
description: A place to share things I find interesting.
baseurl: "/<your-username>" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
url: # the base hostname & protocol for your site
author: Chris Geroux
street_address: 1234 Some st.
city: Halifax
state: NS
zip_code: 55555
country: Canada
phone: (716) 555-5555
.
.
.

Now save and exit nano and rebuild our site.

$ jekyll build -d /var/www/html/<your-username>

Pre-defined _config.yml settings

All Jekyll sites have a _config.yml file which contain site wide settings. Jekyll defines a number of key-value pairs with default values (see these Jekyll docs for the list of predefined keys and their default values). These default key values can be overridden in your site’s _config.yml file. In addition to these predefined keys, themes can define and use their own custom keys so that different themes can have different keys in their _config.yml file. The key baseurl which we changed in order to setup our site is one of these predefined keys and the value that came with the theme was overriding the default value of an empty string "".

Key Points