Host Your Resume Online Using Jekyll and Github Pages
Ever tire of uploading your resume for each and every job application? Use Jekyll and Github Pages instead and send employers to a static web site hosting your resume, showcasing another piece of work using new tech(if jekyll and github pages is new to you, that is) in the process!
And it turns out it’s pretty straightforward! There are a whole lot of tools, templates and others in the community to help out. In the case I’ll delve into, we’ll be looking at a Ruby gem called Jekyll, which compiles plain text and renders it as a static web site. It’s pretty simple to use. For example, there’s one _config.yml file, which you’ll edit to change personal info toward the head of the page. And wouldn’t you know it?! The README.md explicitly tells you that editing that particular file is the only time you’ll need to restart your server to see those changes.
All other resume information is split up into different files like ‘education.yml’, ‘experience.yml’, and so forth, and you’ll only need to refresh your page to see your changes there. You can read more about Jekyll, or see how to download it as a Ruby gem here. I myself hadn’t used Ruby in awhile, and therefore hadn’t installed any gems in awhile, so definitely check those docs if need be.
As I mentioned, there are a whole lot of tools at your disposal, and plenty of people have taken it upon themselves to write some templates for static jekyll pages. In this case I used one provided by jglovier on github. Fork or clone from whichever template you choose, but then make your own repository, as that’s the repository you’ll be using when you’re hosting on github pages.
These are mostly .yml files that you’ll be editing as far as content goes, but you can go a whole lot further if you’d like. Besides there simply being html files for you to switch section orders and bullet points and things of that nature, there are Sass files if you really want to get in there and get your hands dirty. There will be obvious things like changing the avatar photo, but fonts and color will require you to get into the nested Sass files, which apparently, really wasn’t all that difficult to figure out either:
Use your Dev Tools! Anyway, before we get too off topic, let’s pretend we have this resume looking exactly the way we want it at this point. Not let’s get it on Github pages. All you need is a Github account! When you host this page on Github pages, it will be from the repository you’re in, and it will look like this: <username>.github.io/repository-name. Since this is the case, you’ll want to make sure you’ve made your own repository and have been pushing all of your changes to it.
When you’re in the repository you want to host your static page(resume) from, make sure you’re on the gh-pages branch and go to <username>.github.io/repository-name in your browser. You should see your page! You can give it a custom domain if you choose. Check my static github.pages hosted resume here, or check me out at troydavidcook.com. Thanks for reading, and happy posting!
