@Jekyll is a great way to generate static websites. Its simplicity and beauty make it a natural choice for developers who prefer to use laravel for heavy lifting but need to create static sites for some reason (like this blog).
For development, Jekyll ships with a serve mode which runs an integrated http server and detects local file changes.
However, I found this was un-reliable in vagrant/homestead shared folders, so I opted for a more integrated solution.
In your homestead folder, create a new file at /scripts/serve-jekyll.sh with the following content.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
block="server {
listen $3 $7;
listen $4 ssl http2 $7;
server_name $1;
root \"$2\";
index index.html;
charset utf-8;
# disable all caching which could cause confusion in a dev environment
add_header 'Cache-Control' 'no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=0';
expires off;
# restrict to only allow GET and HEAD directives
# this is optional and mostly done for autistic reasons
add_header Allow \"GET, HEAD\" always;
if ( \$request_method !~ ^(GET|HEAD)\$ ) {
return 405;
}
# if request is asking for .html page, redirect to url without .html
# (for seo purposes, you may not want this)
if ( \$request_uri ~ ^/(.*)\.html\$ ) {
return 302 /\$1;
}
# attempt to resolve urls lacking .html extension
try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;
# disable logging
access_log off;
error_log off;
sendfile off;
# set error templates
error_page 404 /404.html;
error_page 405 /405.html;
ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/$1.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/$1.key;
}
"
echo "$block" > "/etc/nginx/sites-available/$1"
ln -fs "/etc/nginx/sites-available/$1" "/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/$1"
sites:
...
- map: jekyll.test
to: /path_to_jekyll/_site
type: jekyll
...
Once the configurator file is created and Homestead.yaml changes saved, re-provision the VM for the change to take effect. To begin developing run the following command:
sudo bundle exec jekyll build --watch --force_polling --drafts --future