What is a Jekyll theme?#

If you build a Jekyll site, you'll typically use a theme to style your site or at least give a base which you and customize on top of.

A theme is a way of packaging layout files, CSS styling and includes files to be installed in another Jekyll project. A theme might be made from scratch or based on a static HTML. A theme is a great way of making styling reusable across projects by you and other people.

A good example of a theme is Minima, which is the default theme used when running jekyll new PATH.

When to not use a theme#

There is overhead to setting up and maintaining a theme as its own repo. So if you only plan to use the styling once for your own project and you also do not intend other to use your styling, then consider just making a plain Jekyll site which has layouts and CSS in it.

And it can still be setup as template for others to use or fork and allows customization. See for example this project which is not a theme but just a template project with page structure, styling and sample content.