With the blog post you will learn how to set up you own blog with Jigsaw.

Prerequisites:

* PHP 7.4+
* composer

Let us get started

open your terminal, and type in

$ composer require tightenco/jigsaw
$ ./vendor/bin/jigsaw init blog

And that's it for now.

Watch the result

Now you can watch you blog

$ ./vendor/bin/jigsaw serve

Now go to http://localhost:8000 and you will see the demo blog from Tighten.

There are a few things that you should pay attention to. Bellow there a snippet of some of the directories.

Every category you want on your blog, you need a markdown file in your _categories-folder. The Layouts are all stored in the _layouts-folder, and last but not least, the blog posts itself are located in _posts-folder.

── _categories
│   ├── configuration.md
│   └── feature.md
├── _layouts
│   ├── category.blade.php
│   ├── main.blade.php
│   ├── master.blade.php
│   ├── post.blade.php
│   └── rss.blade.php
└── _posts
    ├── custom-404-page.md
    ├── customizing-your-site.md
    ├── fuse-search.md
    ├── getting-started.md
    ├── mailchimp-newsletters.md
    └── my-first-blog-post.md

The blog posts have a structure like

---
extends: _layouts.post
section: content
title: My First Blog Post
date: 2017-03-23
description: This is your first blog post.
cover_image: /assets/img/post-cover-image-2.png
---

This is the start of your first blog post.

The section between the --- is the metadata which all can be reached within the template (_layouts/post.blade.php) by using $page->title or $page->date. The part after the --- is simple markdown and your blog post, the <h1> will, with the default template, be rendered from the title so you would not need to add a # Headline yourself.

The filename in this case my-first-blog-post.md, will also be the URL of the post e.g. http://localhost:8000/blog/my-first-blog-post

And now?

Now you are ready to start tweaking the setup to fit your needs. Instead of using the ./vendor/bin/jigsaw serve you can also use npm run watch which will start a browser with hot-reload on changes, so that you will not need to refresh your browser on every change.

Disclaimer:

If adding a new blog-post you would need to restart the jigsaw serve or npm run watch otherwise it will not detect the new file.

Deployment

For deploying your new blog, I recommend looking at the Jigsaw Documentation, to find the one matching your needs. I'm deploying my blog with netlify.

Conclusion

I think I have till this day not worked with a blog system that was easier to get started with than Jigsaw, I really enjoy working with it, and it got me started really fast.