al-folio

A simple, clean, and responsive Jekyll theme for academics. If you like the theme, give it a star!

User community

The vibrant community of al-folio users is growing! Academics around the world use this theme for their homepages, blogs, lab pages, as well as webpages for courses, workshops, conferences, meetups, and more. Check out the community webpages below. Feel free to add your own page(s) by sending a PR.

Lighthouse PageSpeed Insights

Table Of Contents

• User community
• Lighthouse PageSpeed Insights
• Table Of Contents
• Getting started
  • Installation
    • Local setup using Docker (Recommended)
    • Local Setup (Legacy)
    • Deployment
    • Upgrading from a previous version
  • FAQ
• Features
  • Publications
  • Collections
  • Layouts
    • The iconic style of Distill
    • Full support for math & code
    • Photos
  • Other features
    • GitHub's repositories and user stats
    • Theming
    • Social media previews
    • Atom (RSS-like) Feed
    • Related posts
• Contributing
  • Maintainers
  • All Contributors
• License

Getting started

Want to learn more about Jekyll? Check out this tutorial. Why Jekyll? Read Andrej Karpathy's blog post!

Installation

For a hands-on walkthrough of al-folio installation, check out this cool video tutorial by one of the community members! 🎬 🍿

The preferred way of using this template is by clicking in Use this template above the file list. Then, create a new repository at github.com:<your-username>/<your-repo-name>. If you plan to upload your site to <your-github-username>.github.io, note that the name of your repository must be <your-github-username>.github.io or <your-github-orgname>.github.io, as stated in the GitHub pages docs. For more information on how to deploy your site, check the Deployment section below. After you created your new repository, just download it to your machine:

$ git clone git@github.com:<your-username>/<your-repo-name>.git
$ cd <your-repo-name>

Local setup using Docker (Recommended)

Using Docker to install Jekyll and Ruby dependencies is the easiest way.

You need to take the following steps to get al-folio up and running on your local machine:

• First, install docker and docker-compose.
• Finally, run the following command that will pull the latest pre-built image from DockerHub and will run your website.

$ docker compose pull
$ docker compose up

Note that when you run it for the first time, it will download a docker image of size 400MB or so.

Now, feel free to customize the theme however you like (don't forget to change the name!). After you are done, you can use the same command (docker compose up) to render the webpage with all you changes. Also, make sure to commit your final changes.

To change port number, you can edit docker-compose.yml file.

$ docker compose up --build

Local Setup (Legacy)

Assuming you have Ruby and Bundler installed on your system (hint: for ease of managing ruby gems, consider using rbenv), and also Python and pip (hint: for ease of managing python packages, consider using a virtual environment, like venv or conda. If you will use only jupyter, you can use pipx).

$ bundle install
# assuming pip is your Python package manager
$ pip install jupyter
$ bundle exec jekyll serve --lsi

Now, feel free to customize the theme however you like (don't forget to change the name!). After you are done, commit your final changes.

Deployment

Deploying your website to GitHub Pages is the most popular option. Starting version v0.3.5, al-folio will automatically re-deploy your webpage each time you push new changes to your repository! :sparkles:

For personal and organization webpages:

1. The name of your repository MUST BE <your-github-username>.github.io or <your-github-orgname>.github.io.
2. In _config.yml, set url to https://<your-github-username>.github.io and leave baseurl empty.
3. Set up automatic deployment of your webpage (see instructions below).
4. Make changes, commit, and push!
5. After deployment, the webpage will become available at <your-github-username>.github.io.

For project pages:

1. In _config.yml, set url to https://<your-github-username>.github.io and baseurl to /<your-repository-name>/.
2. Set up automatic deployment of your webpage (see instructions below).
3. Make changes, commit, and push!
4. After deployment, the webpage will become available at <your-github-username>.github.io/<your-repository-name>/.

To enable automatic deployment:

1. Click on Actions tab and Enable GitHub Actions; do not worry about creating any workflows as everything has already been set for you.
2. Go to Settings -> Actions -> General -> Workflow permissions, and give Read and write permissions to GitHub Actions
3. Make any other changes to your webpage, commit, and push. This will automatically trigger the Deploy action.
4. Wait for a few minutes and let the action complete. You can see the progress in the Actions tab. If completed successfully, in addition to the master branch, your repository should now have a newly built gh-pages branch.
5. Finally, in the Settings of your repository, in the Pages section, set the branch to gh-pages (NOT to master). For more details, see Configuring a publishing source for your GitHub Pages site.

If you keep your site on another branch, open .github/workflows/deploy.yml on the branch you keep your website on and change on->push->branches and on->pull_request->branches to the branch you keep your website on. This will trigger the action on pulls/pushes on that branch. The action will then deploy the website on the branch it was triggered from.

$ bundle exec jekyll build --lsi

$ purgecss -c purgecss.config.js

$ bundle exec jekyll build --lsi --destination $HOME/repo/publishing-source

Upgrading from a previous version

If you installed al-folio as described above, you can configure a GitHub action to automatically sync your repository with the latest version of the theme.

Go to Settings -> Actions -> General -> Workflow permissions, give Read and write permissions to GitHub Actions, check "Allow GitHub Actions to create and approve pull requests", and save your changes.

Then go to Actions -> New workflow -> set up a workflow yourself, setup the following workflow and commit your changes:

name: Sync from template
on:
    # cronjob trigger
  schedule:
  - cron:  "0 0 1 * *"
  # manual trigger
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  repo-sync:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # To use this repository's private action, you must check out the repository
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: actions-template-sync
        uses: AndreasAugustin/actions-template-sync@v0.7.3
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          source_repo_path: alshedivat/al-folio
          upstream_branch: master

You will receive a pull request within your repository if there are some changes available in the template.

Another option is to manually update your code by following the steps below:

# Assuming the current directory is <your-repo-name>
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/alshedivat/al-folio.git
$ git fetch upstream
$ git rebase v0.9.0

If you have extensively customized a previous version, it might be trickier to upgrade. You can still follow the steps above, but git rebase may result in merge conflicts that must be resolved. See git rebase manual and how to resolve conflicts for more information. If rebasing is too complicated, we recommend re-installing the new version of the theme from scratch and port over your content and changes from the previous version manually.

FAQ

Here are some frequently asked questions. If you have a different question, please ask using Discussions.

1. Q: After I create a new repository from this template and setup the repo, I get a deployment error. Isn't the website supposed to correctly deploy automatically?
   A: Yes, if you are using release v0.3.5 or later, the website will automatically and correctly re-deploy right after your first commit. Please make some changes (e.g., change your website info in _config.yml), commit, and push. Make sure to follow deployment instructions in the previous section. (Relevant issue: 209.)

2. Q: I am using a custom domain (e.g., foo.com). My custom domain becomes blank in the repository settings after each deployment. How do I fix that?
   A: You need to add CNAME file to the master or source branch of your repository. The file should contain your custom domain name. (Relevant issue: 130.)

3. Q: My webpage works locally. But after deploying, it fails to build and throws Unknown tag 'toc'. How do I fix that?
   A: Make sure you followed through the deployment instructions in the previous section. You should have set the deployment branch to gh-pages. (Related issue: 1438.)

4. Q: My webpage works locally. But after deploying, it is not displayed correctly (CSS and JS is not loaded properly). How do I fix that?
   A: Make sure to correctly specify the url and baseurl paths in _config.yml. Set url to https://<your-github-username>.github.io or to https://<your.custom.domain> if you are using a custom domain. If you are deploying a personal or organization website, leave baseurl blank. If you are deploying a project page, set baseurl: /<your-project-name>/. If all previous steps were done correctly, all is missing is for your browser to fetch again the site stylesheet.

5. Q: Atom feed doesn't work. Why?
   A: Make sure to correctly specify the url and baseurl paths in _config.yml. RSS Feed plugin works with these correctly set up fields: title, url, description and author. Make sure to fill them in an appropriate way and try again.

6. Q: My site doesn't work when I enable related_blog_posts. Why?
   A: This is probably due to the classifier reborn plugin, which is used to calculate related posts. If the error states Liquid Exception: Zero vectors can not be normalized..., it means that it could not calculate related posts for a specific post. This is usually caused by empty or minimal blog posts without meaningful words (i.e. only stop words) or even specific characters you used in your posts. Also, the calculus for similar posts are made for every post, which means every page that uses layout: post, including the announcements. To change this behavior, simply add related_posts: false to the front matter of the page you don't want to display related posts on.

Features

Publications

Your publications' page is generated automatically from your BibTex bibliography. Simply edit _bibliography/papers.bib. You can also add new *.bib files and customize the look of your publications however you like by editing _pages/publications.md.

scholar:
  last_name: [Einstein]
  first_name: [Albert, A.]

"Adams":
  - firstname: ["Edwin", "E.", "E. P.", "Edwin Plimpton"]
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Plimpton_Adams

"Podolsky":
  - firstname: ["Boris", "B.", "B. Y.", "Boris Yakovlevich"]
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Podolsky

"Rosen":
  - firstname: ["Nathan", "N."]
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Rosen

"Bach":
  - firstname: ["Johann Sebastian", "J. S."]
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach

  - firstname: ["Carl Philipp Emanuel", "C. P. E."]
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Philipp_Emanuel_Bach

Collections

This Jekyll theme implements collections to let you break up your work into categories. The theme comes with two default collections: news and projects. Items from the news collection are automatically displayed on the home page. Items from the projects collection are displayed on a responsive grid on projects page.

You can easily create your own collections, apps, short stories, courses, or whatever your creative work is. To do this, edit the collections in the _config.yml file, create a corresponding folder, and create a landing page for your collection, similar to _pages/projects.md.

Layouts

al-folio comes with stylish layouts for pages and blog posts.

The iconic style of Distill

The theme allows you to create blog posts in the distill.pub style:

For more details on how to create distill-styled posts using <d-*> tags, please refer to the example.

Full support for math & code

al-folio supports fast math typesetting through MathJax and code syntax highlighting using GitHub style:

Photos

Photo formatting is made simple using Bootstrap's grid system. Easily create beautiful grids within your blog posts and project pages:

Other features

GitHub's repositories and user stats

al-folio uses github-readme-stats and github-profile-trophy to display GitHub repositories and user stats on the /repositories/ page.

Edit the _data/repositories.yml and change the github_users and github_repos lists to include your own GitHub profile and repositories to the /repositories/ page.

You may also use the following codes for displaying this in any other pages.

<!-- code for GitHub users -->
{% if site.data.repositories.github_users %}
<div class="repositories d-flex flex-wrap flex-md-row flex-column justify-content-between align-items-center">
  {% for user in site.data.repositories.github_users %}
    {% include repository/repo_user.html username=user %}
  {% endfor %}
</div>
{% endif %}

<!-- code for GitHub trophies -->
{% if site.repo_trophies.enabled %}
{% for user in site.data.repositories.github_users %}
  {% if site.data.repositories.github_users.size > 1 %}
  <h4>{{ user }}</h4>
  {% endif %}
  <div class="repositories d-flex flex-wrap flex-md-row flex-column justify-content-between align-items-center">
  {% include repository/repo_trophies.html username=user %}
  </div>
{% endfor %}
{% endif %}

<!-- code for GitHub repositories -->
{% if site.data.repositories.github_repos %}
<div class="repositories d-flex flex-wrap flex-md-row flex-column justify-content-between align-items-center">
  {% for repo in site.data.repositories.github_repos %}
    {% include repository/repo.html repository=repo %}
  {% endfor %}
</div>
{% endif %}

Theming

A variety of beautiful theme colors have been selected for you to choose from. The default is purple, but you can quickly change it by editing the --global-theme-color variable in the _sass/_themes.scss file. Other color variables are listed there as well. The stock theme color options available can be found at _sass/_variables.scss. You can also add your own colors to this file assigning each a name for ease of use across the template.

Social media previews

al-folio supports preview images on social media. To enable this functionality you will need to set serve_og_meta to true in your _config.yml. Once you have done so, all your site's pages will include Open Graph data in the HTML head element.

You will then need to configure what image to display in your site's social media previews. This can be configured on a per-page basis, by setting the og_image page variable. If for an individual page this variable is not set, then the theme will fall back to a site-wide og_image variable, configurable in your _config.yml. In both the page-specific and site-wide cases, the og_image variable needs to hold the URL for the image you wish to display in social media previews.

Atom (RSS-like) Feed

It generates an Atom (RSS-like) feed of your posts, useful for Atom and RSS readers. The feed is reachable simply by typing after your homepage /feed.xml. E.g. assuming your website mountpoint is the main folder, you can type yourusername.github.io/feed.xml

Related posts

By default, there will be a related posts section on the bottom of the blog posts. These are generated by selecting the max_related most recent posts that share at least min_common_tags tags with the current post. If you do not want to display related posts on a specific post, simply add related_posts: false to the front matter of the post. If you want to disable it for all posts, simply set enabled to false in the related_blog_posts section in _config.yml.

Contributing

Contributions to al-folio are very welcome! Before you get started, please take a look at the guidelines.

If you would like to improve documentation, add your webpage to the list below, or fix a minor inconsistency or bug, please feel free to send a PR directly to master. For more complex issues/bugs or feature requests, please open an issue using the appropriate template.

Maintainers

Our most active contributors are welcome to join the maintainers team. If you are interested, please reach out!

Maruan

Rohan Deb Sarkar

Amir Pourmand

George

All Contributors

Made with contrib.rocks.

License

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Originally, al-folio was based on the *folio theme (published by Lia Bogoev and under the MIT license). Since then, it got a full re-write of the styles and many additional cool features.