---
title: Build arguments
tags: [publishing]
keywords: building, serving, serve, build
last_updated: July 3, 2016
summary: "You use various build arguments with your Jekyll project. You can also create shell scripts to act as shortcuts for long build commands. You can store the commands in iTerm as profiles as well."
sidebar: mydoc_sidebar
permalink: mydoc_build_arguments.html
folder: mydoc
---

## How to build Jekyll sites

The normal way to build the Jekyll site is through the build command:

```
jekyll build
```

To build the site and view it in a live server so that Jekyll rebuilds that site each time you make a change, use the `serve` command:

```
jekyll serve
```

By default, the \_config.yml in the root directory will be used, Jekyll will scan the current directory for files, and the folder `_site` will be used as the output. You can customize these build commands like this:

```
jekyll serve --config configs/myspecialconfig.yml --destination ../doc_outputs
```

Here the `configs/myspecialconfig.yml` file is used instead of `_config.yml`. The destination directory is `../doc_outputs`, which would be one level up from your current directory.

## Shortcuts for the build arguments

If you have a long build argument and don't want to enter it every time in Jekyll, noting all your configuration details, you can create a shell script and then just run the script. Simply put the build argument into a text file and save it with the .sh extension (for Mac) or .bat extension (for Windows). Then run it like this:

```
. myscript.sh
```

My preference is to add the scripts to profiles in iTerm. See [iTerm Profiles][mydoc_iterm_profiles] for more details.

## Stop a server

When you're done with the preview server, press **Ctrl+C** to exit out of it. If you exit iTerm or Terminal without shutting down the server, the next time you build your site, or if you build multiple sites with the same port, you may get a server-already-in-use message.

You can kill the server process using these commands:

```
ps aux | grep jekyll
```

Find the PID (for example, it  looks like "22298").

Then type `kill -9 22298` where "22298" is the PID.

To kill all Jekyll instances, use this:

```
kill -9 $(ps aux | grep '[j]ekyll' | awk '{print $2}')
```

I recommend creating a profile in iTerm that stores this command. Here's what the iTerm settings look like:

{% include image.html file="killalljekyll.png" caption="iTerm profile settings to kill all Jekyll" %}

{% include links.html %}