Adding theme causes site to go blank on Github Pages

[jeffpatton1971]

I have tried adding this via remote-theme: midnight (i used the remote theme plugin as well) and theme: jekyll-theme-midnight. After adding the theme in either way the entire site went blank. Removing the theme and going back to minima the content showed up. Looking for some advice on what to do next? Also, I noted the same behaviour when attempting to run this site locally.

[johnholliday]

Getting similar results trying to use remote_theme: just-the-docs. The generated home page references the default css file, but the file is empty and the supporting css files are missing as if the Jekyll process aborted before copying all the remote theme files.

I'm using the following build settings in _config.yml

# Build settings
#theme: minima
remote_theme: pmarsceill/just-the-docs
plugins:
  - jekyll-feed
  - jekyll-remote-theme

My Gemfile contains the following settings:

# If you want to use GitHub Pages, remove the "gem "jekyll"" above and
# uncomment the line below. To upgrade, run `bundle update github-pages`.
gem "github-pages", "~> 223", group: :jekyll_plugins
# If you have any plugins, put them here!
group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem "jekyll-feed", "~> 0.12"
  gem "jekyll-remote-theme", "~> 0.4.3"
end

[jeffpatton1971]

Would be nice if there was a verbose option or something

[nicholasrobertm]

Did yall change the layout in each of your markdown files? At least for this theme you need to change to the "default" layout

[iankingcoop]

Did anyone find a solution to this? Github pages was looking like a great option to quickly get a blog up and running. However, all of the alternative themes cause my blog entries (on the main pages URL) to go blank.

[jeffpatton1971]

@iankingcoop this is ultimately what i have done with mine

# Build settings
markdown: kramdown
remote_theme: jekyll/minima
#theme: minima

minima:
  skin: dark
plugins:
  - jekyll-feed
  - jekyll-remote-theme
  - jekyll-sitemap

I've not had that issue since on my sites

[farmfreshmeth]

I had to copy and modify _layouts/default.html into my project. (And I'm successfully using the theme on GitHub pages. See https://github.com/studio84pottery/studio84pottery.github.io)

[mimocha]

Did yall change the layout in each of your markdown files? At least for this theme you need to change to the "default" layout

This was the answer for me, and I wished the usage instructions were clearer for beginners trying to just setup their blogsites.

For anyone else confused like me, the Front Matter of your posts / pages must be set to a Layout defined within your theme's _layouts directory.

For example, the theme minima provides the following layout files:

# https://github.com/jekyll/minima/tree/master/_layouts
- base.html
- home.html
- page.html
- post.html

To use the minima theme, you set the Front Matter of your index.md and your posts to use one of the above filenames (excluding the .html part):

---
layout: post
title: My first blog post
---
# Your post goes here

Meanwhile, midnight here only provides a single layout file:

# https://github.com/pages-themes/midnight/tree/master/_layouts
- default.html

Which means that if you want to use the midnight theme out of the box, your Front Matter must be something like

---
layout: default
title: My first blog post
---
# Your post goes here

(You can ofcourse, define your own layout.html files and then use those too.)