Starter Web

Quickstart

an amazing site in 15 minutes

All you need for your new amazing site.

Jekyll meets Bootstrap - and makes a lot of friends. J1 Template combines the best of OpenSource software for the Web and the Web site generator Jekyll. J1 is OpenSource, and so are the packaged modules. No pain for private or professional use. Check J1 Template today to learn what’s possible if you go to the Jekyll Way.

Create powerful modern Static Webs: Secure, Flexible and Fast.

The template comes with a Web included, a skeleton for new website created with J1 Template. This Web is called the Starter Web, a general-purpose Website scaffold to be modified for your needs. The built-in Starter Web can be visited live at J1 Publish. This site show live pages deployed on the Internet on Github, Netlify and Heroku.

Have fun exploring what a modern static web, a Jekyll site can do!

The Software needed

J1 is supported on all current x64-based OS:

  • Windows 10, build >= 1903

  • Windows WSL 2

  • Linux, kernel version >= 4.15 (e.g. Ubuntu 18.x LTS)

  • OSX, version >= 10.10.5 (Yosemite)

Note that 32-bit versions (x32) are generally NOT supported for all platforms.

Development languages and tools

To run the Development System for J1 Template, the following languages and tools expected to be in place with your OS:

  • Ruby language, version >= 2.6 < 3.x

  • Javascript language (NodeJS), version >= 12.x < 13.x

The lastest versions 3.x of Ruby are currently NOT supported by Jekyll neither by J1. More current or older versions of NodeJS may work, but not tested.

Software upgrades needed for all platforms

If Ruby and NodeJS are in place, some packages are to be upgraded to more current versions. Install all packages system-wide with their respective product installation pathes.

Upgrades needed for Ruby < v2.7

Install latest bundler for Ruby:

gem install bundler --no-document

Install latest RubyGems for Ruby:

gem install rubygems-update --no-document
update_rubygems --no-document
gem update --system

Upgrades needed for NodeJS

NodeJS comes with NPM pre-installed. The native CLI for the NodeJS package management is npm. Besides npm there’s another quite handy CLI for NPM available: Yarn.

The CLI yarn is developed at Facebook and can be used as a replacement for npm. From a top-level perspective, both package management clients behave pretty much the same. The syntax yarn uses is shorter in writing, making the command-line look a bit more natural. Therefore, we prefer to use yarn.

Yarn adds some additional features to the NodeJS package management implemented for the needs at Facebook. Regarding the J1 development system, those add-ons are neither needed nor used.

Install latest NPM and Yarn packages for NodeJS:

npm install -g npm@latest
npm install -g yarn@latest

Create a Starter Web

Running the J1 template project is very simple:

  • Download the J1 Gem

  • Create a J1 web project

  • Setup the runtime environment for your project

  • Run and develop the buildin starter web

Find all details on this with the sections below.

Download the J1 Gem

The Gem for J1 Template (runtime system) is published on RubyGems. You can get it by installing the package using the Ruby gem command or by downloading it from RubyGems.

Userized installation
gem install j1-template --remote --user-install --no-document
System-wide installation
gem install j1-template --remote --no-document
To not pollute the system-wide Gem folder of a Ruby-installation by user and project specific Gems, it is recommend to install J1 userized.

J1 is a so-called gem-based template, a Ruby Gem managed by the (gem) internal executeable (command) j1. Check your version installed or some usage information by running:

Version information
j1 --version
Usage information
j1 --help

Setup a project

Is the Ruby Gem J1 installed, a project, a website needs to be generated by J1’s build-in executable j1. The command j1 is used to manage base project tasks like generating a project.

If a project (a website) is generated, all development tasks are managed by NPM scripts (NodeJS). Development tasks are defined as scripts with the project config file package.json.

First, create a projects folder for all website to be generated J1. For the following examples, a project is generated on Windows using C:\Temp for the project’s folder.

Usage information
j1 generate starter
Output
Running bundle install in c:/Temp/starter ...
Install bundle in USER gem folder ~/.gem ...
    Bundler: Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/ ...
    Bundler: Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/.
    Bundler: Resolving dependencies...
    Bundler: Using rake 12.3.3
    Bundler: Using public_suffix 4.0.6
    ...
    Bundler: Using wdm 0.1.1
    Bundler: Bundle complete! 34 Gemfile dependencies, 86 gems now installed.
    Bundler: Bundled gems are installed into `../../Users/jadams/.gem`
Install patches in USER gem folder ~/.gem ...
Install patches on path C:/Users/jadams/.gem/ruby/2.6.0 ...
Generated Jekyll site force installed in folder c:/Temp/starter

Setup the runtime

The command j1 generate creates a project folder with the name given. In this example, the project is starter. Change to this folder

cd C:\Temp\starter

A J1 project consists in several files and folders. Find a typical structure as below:

J1 Project structure
  ├──── .
  │     └─ _data  (1)
  │     └─ _includes (2)
  │     └─ _plugins (3)
  │     └─ assets (4)
  │     └─ collections (5)
  │     └─ pages (6)
  │     └─ utilsrv
  ├──── _config.yml (7)
  ├──── config.ru
  ├──── dot.gitattributes
  ├──── dot.gitignore
  ├──── dot.nojekyll
  ├──── favicon.ico
  ├──── Gemfile (8)
  ├──── index.html (9)
  └──── package.json (10)
1 Configuration data for the website
2 Asciidoc (global) includes
3 Build-in (Ruby) plugins
4 Assets for the web
5 Folder that contains all blog posts
6 Folder that contains all (article) pages
7 Central (Jekyll) site configuration
8 Ruby Gemfile
9 Homepage for the web
10 (NPM) Project file

The first step, done only once, is to initialize a project. What means to download and install all resources for your new website followed by an initial creation process for the new site. Initializing a project is managed by the (NPM) task setup. A bunch of sub-tasks get fired, all of them managed by NPM.

Let’s start …​

yarn setup

Because a lot of sub-tasks getting started for a (first) setup, see below the output as a summary:

Setup project for first use ..
Bootstrap base modules ..
done.
Configure environment ..
done.
Create project folders ..
Create log folder ..
Create archived log folder ..
Create etc folder ..
done.
Bootstrap project modules ..
Bootstrap utility server modules ..
done.
Detect OS ..
OS detected: Windows_NT
Build site incremental ..
Configuration file: c:/Temp/starter/_config.yml
            Source: c:/Temp/starter
       Destination: c:/Temp/starter/_site
 Incremental build: enabled
      Generating...
    J1 QuickSearch: creating search index ...
    J1 QuickSearch: finished, index ready.
      J1 Paginator: autopages, disabled|not configured
      J1 Paginator: pagination enabled, start processing ...
      J1 Paginator: finished, processed 5 pagination page|s
                    done in 25.687 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: disabled. Use --watch to enable.
.. build finished.
To open the site, run: yarn site
Done in 88.03s.

The setup process will take a while - typically some minutes for the first run (depending on the performances of your Internet connection and your workstation). A bunch of NPM modules and Ruby Gems are downloaded and linked for the components part of the project. See setup as an extended install and build process to manage an initial setup for your new website.

Run and develop a starter web

Running the Starter Web for development is done like so:

yarn site

The task site does a lot for you; whatever is necessary for a full-stack Web development. The task will put in place all needed CSS and JS components, build the Web content.

Startup the site ..
Configuration file: c:/Temp/starter/_config.yml
            Source: c:/Temp/starter
       Destination: c:/Temp/starter/_site
 Incremental build: enabled
      Generating...
    J1 QuickSearch: creating search index ...
    J1 QuickSearch: finished, index ready.
      J1 Paginator: autopages, disabled|not configured
      J1 Paginator: pagination enabled, start processing ...
      J1 Paginator: finished, processed 5 pagination page|s
                    done in 7.1 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for '.'
LiveReload address: http://localhost:40001
    Server address: http://localhost:40000/
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.
        LiveReload: Browser connected

Finally, the starter web get openend in your default browser.

Go, go, go ..

Rebuild a site

A project runs Jekyll in incremental mode with auto-regeneration enabled. All changes made to the pages (posts) of your web at runtime are automatically detected and the affected are rebuild and (live) reloaded.

To rebuild the site from the scratch, a web can be completely rebuild by running the task rebuild:

yarn rebuild
Rebuild site incremental ..
Clean up site files ..
Configuration file: c:/Temp/starter/_config.yml
           Cleaner: Removing _site...
           Cleaner: Removing ./.jekyll-metadata...
           Cleaner: Removing ./.jekyll-cache...
           Cleaner: Nothing to do for .sass-cache.
Configuration file: c:/Temp/starter/_config.yml
            Source: c:/Temp/starter
       Destination: c:/Temp/starter/_site
 Incremental build: enabled
      Generating...
    J1 QuickSearch: creating search index ...
    J1 QuickSearch: finished, index ready.
      J1 Paginator: autopages, disabled|not configured
      J1 Paginator: pagination enabled, start processing ...
      J1 Paginator: finished, processed 5 pagination page|s
                    done in 25.221 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: disabled. Use --watch to enable.
.. rebuild finished.
To open the site, run: yarn site.
Done in 34.88s.

If the site rebuild, re-run:

yarn site

and continue developing your website.

Reset a project

To start from the beginning, you can reset the runtime system to the factory state. The top-level task reset does the resetting work for you and cleans up each and everything except the NPM modules folder node_modules stored in the project root.

yarn reset

The cleanup runs some tasks for the root folder and in parallel sub-tasks using Jekyll for the Web:

Reset project to factory state ..
Clean up base modules ..
Clean up site files ..
Configuration file: c:/Temp/starter/_config.yml
           Cleaner: Removing _site...
           Cleaner: Removing ./.jekyll-metadata...
           Cleaner: Removing ./.jekyll-cache...
           Cleaner: Nothing to do for .sass-cache.
Clean up projects files ..
Remove bundle config folder ..
Remove log folder ..
Remove etc folder ..
Remove various log files ..
Remove lock files ..
Clean up utility server ..
done.
Done in 10.23s.

To reset the project completely, delete the folder node_modules manually and start from the beginning by running the setup task again:

yarn setup

If the project is newly setup, re-run:

yarn site

and continue developing your website.

Happy Jekylling!