About the Fork

Summary

This fork of jekyll-rtd-theme offers a vastly improved build performance.

The original theme relies on Liquid for building the Auto generated sidebar. This results in very slow build times for larger sites.

Upgrading to Jekyll 4 improves the performance somewhat but the build time remains at an unacceptable level - build time reduction from over 2 minutes to 68 seconds on a test site.

Replacing Liquid with a Ruby plugin for generating the sidebar dramatically reduces the build time - build time reduction from over 2 minutes to just 11 seconds on a test site.

Branches

This fork contains:

• develop - only containing an update to this document,
• jekyll-4-port - a Jekyll 4 port without GitHub Pages offering some performance benefits that come with the updated version of Jekyll,
• sidebar-with-ruby-plugin - developed on top of jekyll-4-port contains a Ruby plug-in that replaces Liquid templates for building the sidebar.

Configuration

• Remove Gemfile.lock in the site project when switching theme branches and regenerate with:

  $ bundle update
  

• Specify the branch of the remote theme in site _config.yaml:

  remote_theme: johnnybaloney/jekyll-rtd-theme@<branch-name>
  

• Update the site _config.yaml with theme plugins etc.
• jekyll-remote-theme will not provide the custom plugin. It has to be included with the site files in the _plugins directory, Jekyll will discover it automatically:

  _plugins/render_sidebar.rb
  

Benchmark

Tested on a sample site with 288 markdown files (including 64 README.md files).

develop

Jekyll 3.9.0

$ bundle exec jekyll serve --profile

Filename                                                                            | Count |     Bytes |    Time
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------+-----------+--------
jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-13391-1tgxa8n/_includes/templates/_toctree.liquid      |   230 | 28407.05K | 205.779
_layouts/default.liquid                                                             |   230 | 18192.14K | 102.650
jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-13391-1tgxa8n/_includes/templates/sidebar.liquid       |   230 | 10583.93K |  90.255
jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-13391-1tgxa8n/_includes/templates/toctree.liquid       |   230 | 10351.01K |  89.950
jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-13391-1tgxa8n/_includes/common/rest/workdir.liquid     |   262 |     0.00K |  47.739
jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-13391-1tgxa8n/_includes/common/rest/defaults.liquid    |   230 |     0.00K |   9.966
...
                    done in 122.048 seconds.

jekyll-4-port

Jekyll 4.2.0

$ bundle exec jekyll serve --profile

| Filename                                                                            | Count |      Bytes |    Time |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------+------------+---------+
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16437-1tiwpy2/_layouts/default.liquid                  |   230 |  19350.87K |  50.348 |
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16437-1tiwpy2/_includes/templates/_toctree.liquid      |  8740 |  31544.62K |  48.723 |
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16437-1tiwpy2/_includes/common/rest/site_pages.liquid  |   314 |      0.31K |  36.865 |
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16437-1tiwpy2/_includes/common/rest/defaults.liquid    |   230 |     13.93K |  28.075 |
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16437-1tiwpy2/_includes/templates/sidebar.liquid       |   230 |  11976.51K |  21.915 |
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16437-1tiwpy2/_includes/templates/toctree.liquid       |   230 |  11743.59K |  21.902 |
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16437-1tiwpy2/_includes/common/rest/workdir.liquid     |  9282 |    552.93K |  17.686 |
...
                    done in 68.658 seconds.

sidebar-with-ruby-plugin

Jekyll 4.2.0 + sidebar rendering with a Ruby plugin rather than Liquid

$ bundle exec jekyll serve --profile

| Filename                                                                            | Count |     Bytes |   Time |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------+-----------+--------+
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16758-1o7yw7q/_layouts/default.liquid                  |   230 | 16022.46K |  2.883 |
| search_data.json                                                                    |     1 |  2632.69K |  2.750 |
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16758-1o7yw7q/_includes/common/rest/defaults.liquid    |   230 |     0.00K |  1.927 |
| jekyll-remote-theme-20210729-16758-1o7yw7q/_includes/common/rest/site_pages.liquid  |   265 |     0.00K |  1.738 |
...
                    done in 11.289 seconds.

jekyll-rtd-theme

Just another documentation theme compatible with GitHub Pages

What it does?

This theme is inspired by sphinx-rtd-theme and refactored with:

• @primer/css
• github-pages (dependency versions)

Quick start

remote_theme: rundocs/jekyll-rtd-theme

You can generate with the same files and folders from rundocs/starter-slim

Usage

Documentation that can guide how to create with Github pages, please refer to rundocs.io for details

Features

• Shortcodes (Toasts card, mermaid)
• Pages Plugins (emoji, gist, avatar, mentions)
• Auto generate sidebar
• Attribute List Definitions (Primer/css utilities, Font Awesome 4)
• Service worker (caches)
• SEO (404, robots.txt, sitemap.xml)
• Canonical Link (Open Graph, Twitter Card, Schema data)

Options

name	default value	description
title	repo name
description	repo description
url	user domain or cname
baseurl	repo name
lang	en
direction	auto	ltr or rtl
highlighter	rouge	Cannot be changed

# folders sort
readme_index:
  with_frontmatter: true

meta:
  key1: value1
  key2: value2
  .
  .
  .

google:
  gtag:
  adsense:

mathjax: # this will prased to json, default: {}

mermaid:
  custom:     # mermaid link
  initialize: # this will prased to json, default: {}

scss:   # also _includes/extra/styles.scss
script: # also _includes/extra/script.js

translate:
  # shortcodes
  danger:
  note:
  tip:
  warning:
  # 404
  not_found:
  # copyright
  revision:
  # search
  searching:
  search:
  search_docs:
  search_results:
  search_results_found: # the "#" in this translate will replaced with results size!
  search_results_not_found:

plugins:
  - jemoji
  - jekyll-avatar
  - jekyll-mentions

The license

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License