Several years ago, Jekyll, the open source project that powers GitHub Pages, introduced shared themes. Since then, you have been able to use about a dozen themes to change the look and feel of your GitHub Pages site.

Starting today, you can use any of the hundreds of community-curated themes on GitHub.com. To build your site with any public, GitHub-hosted theme, add the following to your site’s _config.yml file:

remote_theme: owner/name

Replacing owner and name with the repository’s owner and name.

And if you’re interested in making your Jekyll theme available to other users, simply follow the instructions for creating a Gem-based theme, and ensure the repository is public.

For more information, see the Jekyll theme documentation or get in touch.