Seamlessly enable emoji for Jekyll.

1. Install the emoji_for_jekyll gem:

    gem install emoji_for_jekyll
   

2. Add emoji_for_jekyll to the list of gems in config.yml:

gems: ["emoji_for_jekyll"]

3. See beautiful emoji!

or

1. Copy emoji_for_jekll.rb and emoji.json into the _plugins directory

This plugin (and as a matter of fact, most Jekyll plugins) do not work with GitHub Pages as GitHub (understandably) do not allow arbitrary code to be executed on their servers. As a result, only selected plugins work with GitHub pages.

Here are my suggestions if you are using GitHub Pages:

1. Build your site locally and push the content of _site.

2. Use Jemoji.

You can also whitelist or blacklist certain emojis. On the posts or pages that you want to whitelist or blacklist certain emojis, add emoji-whitelist or emoji-blacklist follow by a list of emojis without the colons to the front matter. For example:

emoji-whitelist:
  - bowtie
  - blush

or

emoji-blacklist:
  - smile

When both emoji-whitelist and emoji-blacklist are declared, the effect will be the same as when only the whitelist is declared.

You may choose to disable this plugin for certain posts or pages by adding emoji: false to the front matter of these posts and pages.

If, for some reason, you want to disable this plugin for the entire site, you can either remove emoji-for-jekyll.rb from _plugins, or just add emoji: false to _config.yml.

If you need to emojify certain items in your front-matter, like title or caption that is needed for some templates, you can do so by setting emoji-additional-keys in _config.yml. This setting is optional and expects an array:

emoji-additional-keys: ["title", "caption"]

By default the images are sourced from GitHub CDN but should you want to use other images you can by choosing a directory with the setting emoji-images-path in _config.yml. For example: emoji-images-path: 'img/emoji'

Images copied into this directory will be added the whitelist. E.g.: custom.png would whitelist :custom:. Any images with the same name as the emoji list will overwrite the default GitHub emoji image.

Updating Emoji for Jekyll is very easy:

gem update emoji_for_jekyll