Creating a website with Franklin.jl

Franklin is a Julia package which helps with creating static websites in Julia. Let's see how to set a website up, and publish it with Github Pages!

Creating the website

Installing Franklin.jl

If not already done, install Julia (see here to see how).

Enter the Julia REPL (typing julia in a terminal). Type ] to enter Pkg mode (the docs explain quite well how to use the REPL). Then, writing

add  Franklin

will install Franklin.jl for you. Yey!

First website!

You can create a website as easily as this:

julia> using Franklin
julia> newsite("MyFirstSite")

Then, writing

julia> serve()

will start a server at http://localhost:8000/ (which can be stopped with Ctrl+C in the terminal). Open this in your browser and tadam, you have a website!

It won't be beautiful though. To fix this, choose a template over there; I am using Minimal Mistakes. Now type this in the REPL (replacing my_template with your choice):

julia> newsite("MyFirstSite", template="my_template")

Now, you can start filling you website with anything you want! Follow the Franklin docs (which actually explain what I'm writing here in greater detail) and you template's docs to create the website.

Publishing the Github page

Version control: git

Version control is incredibly useful, and easy to learn (should write an article on that soon). I will assume here that you have git installed, set up and linked with your Github account. Go to github.com, and create an empty repository with the name username.github.io, replacing username with your actual username in lowercase.

Now, open a terminal in your local website's folder, and type:

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "First commit"
$ git branch -M main
$ git remote add origin git@github.com:Username/username.github.io.git
$ git push -u origin main

again replacing Username and username with your username, real and lowercased.

Franklin defined for you (in the .github/workflows folder) a Github action triggering every time you push commits to the remote repository. This will deploy your website to the gh-pages branch; we only have have to tell Github to get the files there. On the main Github page of your repo, you must wait for the orange circle to become a green check, indicating that the Github Action finished.

Go to https://github.com/Username/username.github.io/settings/pages (again, replacing username etc.), scroll down to Build and deployment. Source should be set to Deploy from a branch and Branch to gh-pages (leaving the second selection to / (root)). You website should be up very soon (in a few seconds for me) at https://username.github.io; congratulations, you now have a personal webpage!

Maintaining and checking the webpage

• Create correct favicon with Real Favicon checker, then check with the checker

• Check for broken links with broken-link-checker

Troubleshooting

Again, the Franklin docs are great, so give them a go if you lack some information (here for the deployment to Github pages)