Beautiful Jekyll was initially developed as a GitHub Pages theme that was meant to be used via forking, but several years later GitHub released the remote themes feature that allows you to use a theme on any GitHub repository. For full details, you should read GitHub’s documentation on remote themes, but here is a summary of the steps required:
- Create a new GitHub repository (or go to an existing repository).
- Add remote_theme:
daattali/beautiful-jekyll@6.0.1
to your_config.yml
file (remove any previoustheme
orremote_theme
parameters that may have been there before). - Go to Settings, click on the Pages tab on the left side, select “master” (or “main”) in the Branch section, and click Save.
- Your website will be at
https://YOURUSERNAME.github.io/REPOSITORY
- Go through Beautiful Jekyll’s
_config.yml
file and copy any settings you want to use into your project’s config file. - Some config features will not work immediately because of missing files that you’ll need to copy from Beautiful Jekyll into your project:
- To enable the tags index page, you need to copy
tags.html
. - To enable the RSS feed, copy
feed.xml
. - If you use staticman comments, copy
staticman.yml
and_data/ui-text.yml
.
- To enable the tags index page, you need to copy
- If you want the home page to include a feed of all blog posts, create an
index.html
file and uselayout: home
in its YAML.
If at any point in the future you want to update to a newer version of Beautiful Jekyll, you can simply update the remote_theme or gem fields accordingly.