Alex Chen — Personal Website

Personal website built with Jekyll, deployed via GitHub Pages.

---

Local Development

Prerequisites

Install Ruby via Homebrew (one-time setup):

brew install ruby
echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/ruby/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
gem install bundler

Install dependencies

bundle install

Start dev server

bundle exec jekyll serve

Open http://localhost:4000/ in your browser. The site auto-rebuilds when you save changes.

For live reload in the browser:

bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload

---

Development

For the development of site, I follow the steps below:

• Use some markdown files as draft to write what ever I want;
• Use the AI tools to help me reformat so that it is compatible with the site;

---

Deployment

Push to main and the site is live in ~2 minutes. That's it.

The Deploy site GitHub Actions workflow runs automatically on every push to main that touches content files (posts, assets, config, templates, scripts, etc.) and:

1. Builds the Jekyll site with JEKYLL_ENV=production
2. Purges unused CSS
3. Deploys to GitHub Pages via the official actions/deploy-pages action

PRs against main run the build as a check but do not deploy. Pure documentation changes (README.md, etc.) do not trigger a deploy.

Before pushing

Run Prettier to avoid a failing CI check:

npx prettier . --write
git add .
git commit -m "your message"
git push

Manual deploy trigger

Go to Actions → Deploy site → Run workflow to trigger a deployment without a commit.

One-time setup (new repo)

1. Go to Settings → Pages and set source to GitHub Actions.
2. Go to Settings → Actions → General → Workflow permissions and enable Read and write permissions.

---

Commands

Command	Description
bundle install	Install dependencies
bundle exec jekyll serve	Start dev server (localhost:4000)
bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload	Start dev server with live reload
bundle exec jekyll build	Build site to _site/