When installing the Chirpy theme through RubyGems.org, Jekyll can only read files in the folders /_data, /_layouts, /_includes, /_sass and /assets, as well as a small part of options of the /_config.yml file from the theme's gem. If you have ever installed this theme gem, you can use the command bundle info --path jekyll-theme-chirpy to locate these files.

The Jekyll team claims that this is to leave the ball in the user’s court, but this also results in users not being able to enjoy the out-of-the-box experience when using feature-rich themes.

To fully use all the features of Chirpy, you need to copy the other critical files from the theme's gem to your Jekyll site. The following is a list of targets:

.
├── _config.yml
├── _plugins
├── _tabs
└── index.html

To save you time, and also in case you lose some files while copying, we extract those files/configurations of the latest version of the Chirpy theme and the CD workflow to here, so that you can start writing in minutes.

Follow the instructions in the Jekyll Docs to complete the installation of the basic environment. Git also needs to be installed.

Sign in to GitHub and use this template to generate a brand new repository and name it USERNAME.github.io, where USERNAME represents your GitHub username.

Then clone it to your local machine and run:

$ bundle

Please see the theme's docs.

This work is published under MIT License.