Jekyll::Livereload

Adds Livereloading support to Jekyll

Installation

Add this line to your site's Gemfile in the Jekyll Plugin Group:

group :jekyll_plugins do
    gem 'jekyll-livereload'
end

And then execute:

bundle

Usage

This plugin was designed to work with both 3.0.5 and 3.1.3 of Jekyll.

To enable Livereload support you need to add an addition command line switch to the jekyll serve command: --livereload.

If you call jekyll serve --help for all supported serve options, you will notice that two new options have been added.

-L, --livereload   Inject Livereload.js and run a WebSocket Server
-R, --reload_port [PORT]  Port to serve Livereload on

These options have been added by this plugin.

Making Livereload the default

Jekyll::Livereload supports readings configuration values from your local _config.yml file. If you always what to use Livereload, and why wouldn't you, you can add it to your config like so:

# Server Config optiosn
livereload: true    # You no longer need to include --livereload
reload_port: 5678    # If you don't want to use the default port

Caveats

This plugin is dependent on the way Jekyll loads plugins. Jekyll will load anything in the Gemfile plugin group immediately after it includes jekyll and mercenary, both of which need to be modified before Jekyll initializes it's command line options.

If you attempt to use this plugin by installing it in the _plugin directory or by adding it to your _config.yml file, it will not work.

This plugin will break if Jekyll upstream every changes the placement of the call Jekyll::PluginManager.require_from_bundler in it's binary command jekyll to be after the initialization it's command line options.

This is the reason this plugin only works if you include it in the Gemfile

Thanks

A big thanks to Alex Wood! This plugin was inspired by his Hawkins plugin for Jekyll. The reason I made this plugin was because his method did not work with the Github-Pages Gem version of Jekyll, which still uses version 3.0.5. His websocket server was used with very little modification and credit given.

Also thanks to the Livereload Team, a copy of their awesome opensource livereload.js is included with this plugin.