How to Customize Your Jekyll Site

Your site is unique. So you will need a place where you can edit the Jekyll example content. (You’ll remember we created a Jekyll site in the previous article.) Jekyll puts these options into a configuration file called _config.yml. Using this “config” file, this article will show you how to customize your Jekyll site.

Where is the file located?

In previous articles, we talked about using your operating system’s folders. Since Jekyll is installed locally on your computer, you don’t need to use the command line to edit files. You will only need the command line when you want to run specific commands like the ones used to create the site.

This means you can access the Jekyll configuration file by simply opening the folder on your computer in which the site is installed. There, you will see a file called _config.yml. Open this file to edit it.

How to Customize Your Jekyll Site

All of the information you will see in the config file can be used as variables in your site. This would be especially important if you’re designing your own theme. For every day uses, you should not have to change these very often or ever. Here are some of the main options you can edit:

Further (advanced) options are covered in more detail in the official Jekyll configuration guide.

Now, if you run the jekyll serve command from your terminal, you will see the changes when you reload the site at the staging URL: https://127.0.0.1:4000/.