Victoria's Notes

Converting a Jekyll Gem-Based Theme to a Regular Theme

Note that if you convert a gem-based Jekyll theme to a regular theme that lives in your website's directory, you won't receive theme updates.

To convert your theme:

  1. Find the location of the gem directory. In a terminal or command line window, enter bundle info --path minima (replace minima with the actual name of the theme).
  2. Copy all the folders from the gem's directory into your Jekyll site directory; no need to copy over the LICENSE.txt or README.md files.
  3. Find the runtime dependency plugins used by the theme:
    • The plugins will be in the theme's .gemspec file, which should be in the specifications folder of your Ruby installation directory (e.g., /usr/lib/ruby/gems/3.0.0/specifications/minima-2.5.1.gemspec).
    • The plugins you're looking for will should look something like the following:
    	s.add_runtime_dependency(%q<jekyll-feed>.freeze, ["~> 0.9"])
    	s.add_dependency(%q<jekyll-seo-tag>.freeze, ["~> 2.1"])
  1. In your Jekyll website folder, open the Gemfile. In the group :jekyll_plugins do section, add references to the runtime plugins like so:
    group :jekyll_plugins do
      gem "jekyll-feed", "~> 0.12"
      gem "jekyll-seo-tag", "~> 2.7"
    end

**Note:** If one or more of the plugins are already listed in the `Gemfile`, just leave them in place.
  1. In the terminal, enter bundle update.
  2. In your Jekyll site, remove the reference to the theme gem:
    1. Open the Gemfile and remove gem "minima", "~> 2.5".
    2. Open _config.yml and remove theme: minima.

#jekyll