Adding A Remote Theme To Your GitHub Pages Site

I’ll keep this one short and sweet since this process is pretty simple with Jekyll. On this website, I’m using the tale theme from Chester How. The readme on this project gives you a pretty clear path to getting this theme installed so I’ll leave you to that if you want to use the same theme.

There are a few options for installing themes with Jekyll. There’s very complete documentation about Jekyll themes in the documentation. There’s also a very detailed write up on GitHub about installing a theme on your GitHub Pages site. If you’re wicked lazy like me then this post is for you!

To install a remote-theme, you can add a line like this to your _config.yml file and commit the change:

remote_theme: chesterhow/tale

Keep in mind though that doing only this will only work on your live GitHub Pages site. If you want to install a remote-theme and have the ability to preview the site locally, you’ll need to add a couple additional things.

First you’ll have to add the following to your Gemfile:

gem "jekyll-remote-theme"

Then you need to add this to your _config.yml file:

plugins:
  - jekyll-remote-theme

or if you already have a plugins section, then just add the - jekyll-remote-theme line under it.

After that you’ll have to run bundle and then if you run bundle exec jekyll serve you should see your new theme installed on your local site at localhost:4000.