What’s new in GitHub Pages with Jekyll 3.3

GitHub Pages has upgraded to Jekyll 3.3.0, a release with some nice quality-of-life features.

First, Jekyll 3.3 introduces two new convenience filters, relative_url and absolute_url. They provide an easy way to ensure that your site’s URLs will always appear correctly, regardless of where or how your site is viewed. To make it easier to use these two new filters, GitHub Pages now automatically sets the site.url and site.baseurl properties, if they’re not already set.

This means that starting today https://blog.github.com/about/ will produce /repository-name/about/ for Project Pages (and /about/ for User Pages). Additionally, {{ "/about/" | absolute_url }} will produce https://baxterthehacker.github.io/repository-name/about/ for Project Pages (and https://baxterthehacker.github.io/about/ for User Pages or http://example.com/about/ if you have a custom domain set up).

Second, with Jekyll 3.3, when you run jekyll serve in development, it will override your url value with http://localhost:4000. No more confusion when your locally-modified CSS isn’t loading because the URL is set to the production site. Additionally, site.url and absolute_url will now yield http://localhost:4000 when running a server locally.

Finally, to make it easier to vendor third-party dependencies via package managers like Bundler or NPM (or Yarn), Jekyll now ignores the vendor and node_modules directories by default, speeding up build times and avoiding potential errors. If you need those directories included in your site, set exclude: [] in your site’s configuration file.

For more information, see the Jekyll changelog and if you have any questions, please let us know.

Happy publishing!