Command Line Usage

The Jekyll gem makes a jekyll executable available to you in your terminal.

The jekyll program has several commands but the structure is always:

jekyll command [argument] [option] [argument_to_option]

Examples:
    jekyll new site/ --blank
    jekyll serve --config _alternative_config.yml

Typically you’ll use jekyll serve while developing locally and jekyll build when you need to generate the site for production.

For a full list of options and their argument, see Build Command Options.

Here are some of the most common commands:

jekyll new PATH - Creates a new Jekyll site with default gem-based theme at specified path. The directories will be created as necessary.
jekyll new PATH --blank - Creates a new blank Jekyll site scaffold at specified path.
jekyll build or jekyll b - Performs a one off build your site to ./_site (by default).
jekyll serve or jekyll s - Builds your site any time a source file changes and serves it locally.
jekyll clean - Removes all generated files: destination folder, metadata file, Sass and Jekyll caches.
jekyll help - Shows help, optionally for a given subcommand, e.g. jekyll help build.
jekyll new-theme - Creates a new Jekyll theme scaffold.
jekyll doctor - Outputs any deprecation or configuration issues.

To change Jekyll’s default build behavior have a look through the configuration options.