Now that you’ve made a copy of the repository and gotten set up in a code editing environment, it is time to configure your site’s settings. This will be done by editing the code in your site’s _config.yml file.

The _config.ymlfile is full of comments that help to tell you what each setting in the file does. The comments in this file begin with a pound/hash sign #, and they are sometimes used as headings to separate the code into sections or as notes next to items. Reading comments as you encounter them will ensure that you know what the code you are editing will change about your site.

Locating _config.yml

To find the _config.yml file, scroll past the folders which appear at the top of the files. In a copied Github repository it should be the 8th file below the assets folder (Visual Studio Code may slightly rearrange the standalone files).

  • To know you’re in the right file, open it, and you should see the following: A message in the code that begins "Welcome to Jekyll! This config file is meant for settings that affect your entire site..."

If the file you are in does not begin with this message, it is not the _config.yml file, and you should return to the main portion of the repository to locate it.

Editing _config.yml

Before you begin adding other content and further customizing your site, you must change the following items in the _config.yml file so that your site will work as intended. When editing:

  • Only change the text after : where you see the current information that appears on the template site.
  • Write your information “in between quotation marks” as shown.
  • Refer to the lefthand side of the code editor for line numbers (the # in parenthesis for each item below)

Title (14)

A red box surrounding Line 14 of code

This is where you put your site title as you want it to appear in the browser tab and navigation bar. (Note that what appears in the browser tab can be different from the navigation bar. To do this, see “Masthead Title” later on this page.)

Name, Description, URL (17-19)

A red box surrounding Lines 17-19 of code

  • Name (17): Replace with your name, if you are the only contributer to your site, or your organization/class name if this site will host a group’s collected work.
  • Description (18): Replace with a brief description of what your site is.
  • URL (19): Replace with the url of your site. This is based off of the github username with the copied repository and the repository name. By default, without changing the repository name, it should be https://githubUsername.github.io/ds-project. If you have changed your repository name, replace “ds-project” with the new name of your respository after the “/”

Repository (21)

A red box surrounding Line 21 of the code

Replace with your repository name. Similar to the URL, the repository name here should match your copied repository and be based off the the github username with the copied repository. By default, without changing the repository name after making the blank template, it should be githubUsername/ds-project. If you have changed your repository name, replace “ds-project” with the new name of your respository after the “/”

These are the only necessary changes to the _config.yml file.

Additional Changes

The items below can be changed to update other parts of your site, but they do not have to be.

  • Base URL (20): If you want the baseurl to be something other than ds-project, you would update it here. This process requires you to change your repository name in the _config.yml and officially on Github as well. This change will affect all portions of the site that use the repository name. Here is the Github documentation for changing your repository name. Once you have done this, return to the _config.yml file and replace both the repository section and the Base URL section with your updated repository name. Make sure these match in all places.

  • Locale (13): If you want to develop your site in a different language, search for the language followed by the phrase “language code” in your preferred search engine, and replace en-US with the new code.

  • Subtitle (16): If you want to display a tagline on your site, add it here.

  • Masthead Title (23): If you want the title that displays in the top left of each page of your site to be different from the site’s title, update this section with the preferred title for the page display.

  • Search (56): This theme comes with a built in website search function that you can enable by replacing “false” with “true” in this section. The search function can be useful if your are compiling a lot of projects, but note that the formatting on the search window will likely be distorted.

You can read more about some of the other settings in the Minimal Mistakes guide, if you’d like, but it’s not necessary.

Clearing the Template

After setting up the _config.yml file, the next step is to remove the content that comes with the template.

Delete the following:

  • All of the files in the _projects folder, including:
    • 01_installation.md
    • 02_configuration.md
    • …
    • 10_template.md
  • The template images in the assets -> images subfolder
  • The contents of README.md

You will learn about adding your own content in the next section, and after finishing the introductory steps, there are various other tutorials on how to format text, add images, embed content, etc.

Deploying the Site with GitHub Pages

Deployment makes your site visible to anyone with the url and is how you will view changes to your site while you are developing.

  1. Go to your repositories Settings on Github, then Pages
  2. Under “Source” make sure that the “main” branch is selected

At this point your site should attempt to “build” from the code that is in the main branch. Make sure that if you’re working in a code editor like VS Code, that you regularly push your changes to the main branch of your GitHub repository.

In the “Actions” tab of your repository you can see the progress of these builds and often catch errors if they occur in deployment.

Whenever you make a change on the main branch and save or push it, the site will automatically rebuild. For the template site, it took a little over 1 minute for new changes to appear after each build. When updating images, you may want to clear your web cache frequently to ensure you are actually viewing the updates.