Command Line Usage

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

You can use this command in a number of ways:

jekyll new - Creates a new Jekyll site with default gem-based theme
jekyll new --blank - Creates a new blank Jekyll site scaffold
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 doctor - Outputs any deprecation or configuration issues
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

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

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