Deploy Jekyll with Capistrano

If you’re using Jekyll to generate your static website, you may want to deploy it as simple and fast, as Jekyll works. For this case, Ruby ecosystem has remote server automation and deployment tool that called Capistrano .

First of all, you need to create Gemfile in your Jekyll project and add this lines:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'capistrano', '~> 3.4.0'

Then execute:

bundle install && bundle exec cap install

This creates configuration files, that you can change with your parameters. Make sure that you set up production configuration with your server data (/config/deploy/production.rb):

role :app, %w{user@server}
role :web, %w{user@server}

After configuration you can deploy your project with one simple command:

bundle exec cap production deploy

This command deploys source to /var/www/website_name, but it does not generate website. To execute jekyll build command you need to install Ruby using rbenv or RVM first.

Next you should add Capistrano plugin for rbenv in Gemfile:

gem 'capistrano-rbenv', '~> 2.0'

Then execute

bundle exec

And add this line to Capfile:

require 'capistrano/rbenv'

Install Jekyll gem on server and add it to rbenv binaries list in config/deploy.rb:

set :rbenv_map_bins, %w{rake gem bundle ruby jekyll}

Now you can use my capistrano-jekyll gem to execute jekyll build command every time when you deploy your website’s changes:

# Gemfile
gem 'capistrano-jekyll'

$ bundle install && bundle exec cap production deploy