Jekyll Patternbot

Your pompous and persnickety patterning robot.

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There are lots of fantastic tools for creating style guides and pattern libraries—but they all have a lot of embedded knowledge (command line, Gulp, Grunt, PHP, Handlebars, SASS, etc.)

It’s just too much stuff for my students. I don’t want them to have to learn the tool, I want them to use a tool and get on with designing.

My aim is not to replace the wonderful tools that exist, but simplify them into a very minimal package that can get the students familiarized with using style guides without having to learn all the extra stuff.

This is actually my second version of making a pattern library app: the first was a GUI. But after working with students for a while & teaching & understanding their knowledge sphere, I’ve switched to a Jekyll plugin. It’s better at scaffolding their knowledge into future terms and opens up lots learning opportunities within the Jekyll ecosystem.

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Installation & setup

First make sure you have Ruby, RubyGems & Bundler installed. ☛ See this lesson for help with installing the tools.

After cloning your GitHub repo, press Open in Terminal from within GitHub Desktop.

1. Add a Gemfile

Within Terminal type: bundle init—this will create a new file in your folder named Gemfile

Edit your Gemfile and add these lines to the bottom:

gem "jekyll"

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem "jekyll_patternbot"
end

Then pop back over to Terminal and run this command: bundle install

2. Add a Ruby version

In your code editor create a new file named .ruby-version

Enter a current Ruby version number into the file, 2.5.3 is a recent version you can use.

2.5.3

3. Configure Jekyll

Finally we need to configure Jekyll to use Patternbot. It’s already using the Patternbot plugins, as defined in our Gemfile, but we need to specify the Patternbot theme too.

In your code editor, create a new file _config.yml

Add this to your Jekyll _config.yml file:

permalink: pretty

theme: jekyll_patternbot

The permalink: pretty isn’t necessary—but I always like to have nice permalinks in my websites.

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Hosting Jekyll Patternbot

Although GitHub supports Jekyll, its list of allowed plugins is very strict—which means Patternbot cannot run on GitHub Pages.

I suggest using Netlify as a substitute to GitHub hosting for your projects that use Jekyll Patternbot.