GitHub Pages now runs Jekyll 2.2.0

We’ve upgraded GitHub Pages to support the latest version of Jekyll, the open source static site generator. Whether you’re a new user or a savvy veteran, here are a few features that might help make publishing your next site a bit easier:

• Native Sass & CoffeeScript support – Simply commit a .coffee, .sass or .scss file to your site’s repository, and GitHub Pages will transparently output JavaScript or CSS when your site is published.
• Kramdown as the default Markdown engine – In addition to better error handling, Kramdown supports MathJax, fenced code blocks, nested lists, tables, and much more.
• Collections – With collections, Jekyll is no longer limited to just posts and pages—it can now publish all kinds of different documents, such as code methods, team members, or your favorite open source projects.
• JSON data – .json files in the _data directory now get read in and are exposed to Liquid templates as the site.data namespace (along with .yml files).

Under the hood there’s also some great time savers such as front-matter defaults, the where and group_by filters, and a new starter site. Check out the full list of 300+ changes and new features added to Jekyll since version 1.5.1.

If you use Jekyll locally, simply run gem update github-pages, or follow these instructions to update your local build environment to the latest version.

Happy publishing!

Written by

Ben Balter

@benbalter

Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development.