Step by Step Tutorial

7. Assets

Using CSS, JS, images and other assets is straightforward with Jekyll. Place them in your site folder and they’ll copy across to the built site.

Jekyll sites often use this structure to keep assets organized:

.
├── assets
│   ├── css
│   ├── images
│   └── js
...

Sass

Inlining the styles used in _includes/navigation.html is not a best practice, let’s style the current page with a class instead.

<nav>
  {% for item in site.data.navigation %}
    <a href="{{ item.link }}" {% if page.url == item.link %}class="current"{% endif %}>{{ item.name }}</a>
  {% endfor %}
</nav>

You could use a standard CSS file for styling, we’re going to take it a step further by using Sass. Sass is a fantastic extension to CSS baked right into Jekyll.

First create a Sass file at assets/css/styles.scss with the following content:

---
---
@import "main";

The empty front matter at the top tells Jekyll it needs to process the file. The @import "main" tells Sass to look for a file called main.scss in the sass directory (_sass/ by default which is directly under root folder of your website).

At this stage you’ll just have a main css file. For larger projects, this is a great way to keep your CSS organized.

Create a Sass file at _sass/main.scss with the following content:

.current {
  color: green;
}

You’ll need to reference the stylesheet in your layout.

Open _layouts/default.html and add the stylesheet to the <head>:

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>{{ page.title }}</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/styles.css">
  </head>
  <body>
    {% include navigation.html %}
    {{ content }}
  </body>
</html>

The styles.css referenced here is generated by Jekyll from the styles.scss you created earlier in assets/css/.

Load up http://localhost:4000 and check the active link in the navigation is green.

Next we’re looking at one of Jekyll’s most popular features, blogging.

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