Converting from WordPress to Jekyll was pretty easy. My wordpress was self hosted, so I had access to the database info I needed to export my old site.

Export

I followed the Jekyll guide where you run the ruby jekyll-importer with your database info. You might need to update ruby and install the jekyll-import gem and some other dependencies, and may need sudo for some environments.

apt-get install ruby-full
gem install jekyll
gem install jekyll-import
gem install mysql2
gem install bundler

ruby -rubygems -e 'require "jekyll-import";
    JekyllImport::Importers::WordPress.run({
      "dbname"   => "",
      "user"     => "",
      "password" => "",
      "host"     => "localhost",
      "port"     => "3306",
      "socket"   => "",
      "table_prefix"   => "wp_",
      "site_prefix"    => "",
      "clean_entities" => true,
      "comments"       => true,
      "categories"     => true,
      "tags"           => true,
      "more_excerpt"   => true,
      "more_anchor"    => true,
      "extension"      => "html",
      "status"         => ["publish"]
    })'

I couldn’t get this to run from the Dreamhost shell, but I had a Raspberry Pi I could run it on instead, since I didn’t want to have to run through the Windows Jekyll install process. Now I use a Docker container to build on my Windows machine instead. No install needed.

After exporting, I was able to build the site using all the default settings and had a folder called _posts

The wordpress posts all exported as html files containing the html from each post. Some of these might need additional jekyll plugins or include files to display properly, or some manual tweeking. In my case, a lot of the html links didn’t format correctly, and the youtube embeds didn’t display.

cd export-folder
jekyll new .
bundle exec jekyll build

This should create a _site folder in the current directory with the build site. Now start looking for new themes and customizing the site.

Customize

The first thing I did was to configure some of the settings in _config.yaml like title, email, and baseurl. I also deleted a lot of the stub pages that were exported from WordPress. Those were just there to hold the links on my title bar, but jekyll made them into empty pages.

After that, look for a theme or customize one. I didn’t see any premade ones I really liked so I just made some tweaks to the default minima theme. To modify the current theme, you copy the files you want to override from theme’s install to your project in a corresponding folder. As an example, Minmina has _includes/header.html, if you have your own _includes/header.html it will be used instead.

Youtube Embeds

One thing that was missing was the youtube video embeds I had. Using wordpress you only had to include a link to the video on it’s own line and it would automatically add the html required.

Adding extra html for use in the markdown files is straight forward. I added an include file_includes/youtubeEmbed.html with the youtbe html inside:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

And can include it in a post like this:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VcFI91r2zU4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Use Docker for builds

If you are on Linux/macos this might not be needed, since ruby installs are pretty easy.

1. Install Docker for your os
2. Share the windows folder path with your site to VirtualBox if needed
3. Run the Docker builddocker run -it --volume PATH_TO_PROJECT:/srv/jekyll jekyll/builder jekyll build
4. If on linux/mac and not using a VM, you can cd to the jekyll folder and use $PWD insteaddocker run -it --volume $PWD:/srv/jekyll jekyll/builder jekyll build

This will generate the _site, now you can either scp/ftp it to a webhost or run it locally from any http server.

If you want to run the site from the Docker image using the jekyll server:

docker run -it --volume /git/jekyll-temp:/srv/jekyll -p 4000:4000 --expose 4000 jekyll/builder sh -c "bundle install && bundle exec jekyll serve --host=0.0.0.0"

If using VirtualBox, remember to enable port forwarding for port 4000 

Github pages

If you dont want to have to build anything, you can just push the git repo to git hub with a name like username.github.io and they will autodetect and build the site out for you at https://username.github.io

It is nice to build locally first to preview the changes. Having a build setup also lets you deploy the site to any other webhost too.