Previewing

The core feature of the JekyllEx app is the ability to preview your jekyll site on device before pushing it to your version control / deployment platform.

JekyllEx features a feature rich previewer right besides the Editor.

Start the server

Unless the jekyll server is running, you can’t preview your project. Jekyll can serve your site with a wide range of serve command options.

Note

You need to install the dependencies for your project before continuing.

You can start the server both using the:

• UI: The ”▶” button on as well as “Start server” in the ”⋮” dropdown menu.
• Terminal: a valid jekyll command other than just jekyll serve.

JekyllEx reserves the jekyll serve command to build one that suits your needs. You can customize it under the jekyll section in the settings.

For example,

• Enabling prefix bundler will append bundle exec before jekyll serve.
• Enabling live reload will append the -l flag, etc.
• Setting custom flags. All will be copied as they are.

You can view the full list of default customizations possible in the section on jekyll settings.

Note

If you choose to use the terminal, these default configurations apply only when you use the jekyll serve command verbatim. Otherwise your command takes precedence.

Preview

Once the server runs, you can open any file and select the “Preview” tab. This will load the localhost server with the port 4000(customizable via settings) that jekyll uses to serve your site by default.

If the Guess destination setting is enabled, JekyllEx tries to determine the output url of a file. This is useful if you wish to directly preview a post / collection doc while editing it!

Note

Since the serve command is run in the background by the process service, you can choose to close the app and open localhost:4000 in your device’s browser as well!

Stop the server

The UI, terminal and the notification are all linked, so starting and stopping the server from one place or the other doesn’t matter, it reflects everywhere.

For example, you can choose to start it from the UI and stop it from the notification.