09 Intro to Jekyll - 18F/federalist-jekyll-netlify-cms-guides GitHub Wiki

What is Jekyll?

Jekyll is a a Ruby static site generator.

Jekyll is a framework that takes your content, often written in Markdown, and marries it with templates, written in a templating language called Liquid, to produce static HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files that make up your website.

Jekyll was created in 2008 so it’s mature and trusted by numerous private and government organizations around the world such as: Netflix, Spotify, GitHub, Login.gov, 18F, and the USWDS (USWDS).

Although Jekyll is written in Ruby, developers using Jekyll and producing content do not need to know the Ruby language to be successful.

Benefits of a static site generator

Performance, security, and organizational benefits

Eliminating server-side processing and a database connection puts fewer bottlenecks between your content and your users and presents less surface area to attackers. You also benefit from reduced operational complexity with no servers or databases to correctly configure, provision, backup, operate, and maintain. Having your entire website and its configuration exist as static files makes it easy to keep the entire site under version control and push these files to multiple content delivery locations so users receive the content they requested in the fastest way possible.