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The Least You Need to Know About GitHub Pages

The least you need to know about GitHub Pages is laser-focused on one thing: showing how to get a working informational website up and running as fast as possible using GitHub Pages, using only the GitHub website.

Change the appearance of your GitHub Pages site using Jekyll themes

Currently when you view your publication on GitHub pages it looks like this:

Screen shot of default GitHub Pages theme

It’s pretty much identical to what you see on GitHub’s preview. But GitHub has a number of built-in themes you can use to alter your publication’s appearance dramatically. You can see them here. Just click on theme and look for a mention of its preview mode in the GitHub repo where it resides.

See official GitHub Pages Jekyll themes here

To change the theme, use theme: in _config.yml

Among the GitHub themes are one named Dinky and one named Leap Day. To use a theme add the following to _config.yml, which should be in the root of your repo (the docs directory if you’ve been following along).

Start with theme: jekyll-theme-

Put the following in docs/_config.yml but don’t save it yeet:

theme: jekyll-theme-

End with the theme name

End the line with the theme name in lowercase. If the theme name has spaces replace them with dash characters.

Example: Dinky theme

theme: jekyll-theme-dinky

Again, even though the theme is named just Dinky it must be lowercased and preceded by jekyll-theme- as shown in the previous example.

Save changes and preview

Screen shot of Dinky theme

Example: Leap Day theme

theme: jekyll-theme-leap-day

Screen shot of Leap Day theme

Example: Merlot:

theme: jekyll-theme-leap-merlot

Screen shot of Merlot theme

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