Jekyll & GitHub Pages not building properly at localhost

Question

I downloaded GitHub page as .zip to my PC so I can edit it locally. I installed:

• Ruby 2.7+Devkit from this webpage https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/
• Jekyll (with bundler) according to their tutorial: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/installation/windows/
• GitHub pages gem according to this tutorial https://kbroman.org/simple_site/pages/local_test.html

However when serving the webpage using jekyll serve and visiting http://localhost:4000 I only saw list of directories like this: https://i.imgur.com/2vibYbv.png. So I wanted to execute bundle install but it told me no Gemfile was found so I created one as a copy of Gemfile from default new Jekyll project. I replaced the minima template for jekyll-theme-cayman which is the theme of GitHub pages and then changed the jekyll version to work with it. Then I successfully bundle install and bundle exec jekyll serve however I still saw only the list of directories. When I checked the _site subfolder, I saw no generated .html as were in the new generated Jekyll project. I spent fair amount of time figuring...

Answer 1

While the answer is so simple. In Gemfile copied from the empty generated project, one must comment out the jekyll version and uncomment the github pages line. If I read the file instead of googling aimlessly what to do... I would like to keep this Q&A as I did not come across exactly the same thing when googling, so it might be helpful to somebody new to Jekyll.