Hello everyone!
I am really excited to share with you my latest project JekyllEx, using which you can manage blog posts on your Jekyll site if its hosted on GitHub.
I have been working on this the past month. I primarily built it as a part of a hackathon but I am sure it would be a useful to many.
I have explained all about JekyllEx in this article at my blog, do read it to know more!
The app is open source:
I wish it could be featured somewhere on the main Jekyll repository/website as I will be adding more features and maintain the app. If one of the moderators see it, I would be obliged if it could be done =)
I am really curious about what you think about the project. Thanks for taking the time to check my project out!
Very interesting, Gourav.
Happy to see the younger generation taking interest in Jekyll.
I’m one of the maintainers of Jekyll and have always desired to have a native app to improve workflow with Jekyll.
However regarding your app, apart from the name, is there any other connection with Jekyll?
From what I understand, the app is just consuming GitHub API to allow edits to repository files.
If yes, then the app isn’t strictly Jekyll oriented but can be seen as a generic subset of an android app for GitHub.
Therefore sadly, I do not think this (in its present condition) warrants being featured on the Jekyll website.
FYI, Jekyll could be run on JRuby (Java implementation of the Ruby language) as well (apart from mainstream CRuby / MRI). Something for you to experiment with…
P.S. My android dev knowledge is zero and have no clue if kotlin and jruby have compatiblity issues.
A
Hey @ashmaroli I am very sorry for the super late response, I haven’t been in touch with the jekyll talk forum so I missed this reply 
I agree that in the current form, it consumes GitHub APIs. I myself have been figuring out ways to add native jekyll support to the devices.
Regarding the JRuby implementation, I am not sure that way would work or not. Because Android doesn’t run JVM under the hood. It’s based on DVM, which can understand instructions from .dex files (Dalvik Executables).
When we write Apps in Java, the code gets converted to byte code, and then the byte code is compiled to the .dex format.
But there’s a possible solution: Android provides NDK for native C/C++ development on Android. The termux team has patched the CRuby implementation and successfully compiled it using NDK, ready to be used on the devices. The package also installs the gem package manager which I hope can be used to install jekyll and bundler on the device.
Once we have the compiled .so or .deb files we can call functions inside them using Kotlin/Java code, this is possible by NDK.
I got in touch with the team, and they could assist me in compiling ruby for JekyllEx. I think I can take this task as a hobby because I would learn a lot about underlying linux in Android and other packaging things in general. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.
Thanks a lot!
Super news, @gouravkhunger
Best wishes on the journey ahead!
1 Like
Hi @ashmaroli!
Today is exactly 3 years since the first release of the app. And we’ve got to where we aimed to be!
Just a few hours ago I released the first re-worked (from the ground up) version of the application.
Now it does include the compiled for android ruby ecosystem, having the github-pages gem for the jekyll environment, along with git bundled within to provide a comprehensive environment to actually be able to manage a Jekyll blog on device!
There’s so much improved and a lot that I’ve worked on. I would love it if you please check out the website and latest docs to give it a look.
Looking forward to your feedback :))