// the find
benbalter/jekyll-remote-theme
Jekyll plugin for building Jekyll sites with any GitHub-hosted theme
A Jekyll plugin that lets you point your site at any public GitHub repo as a theme — no gem publishing required. It downloads, extracts, and merges the remote theme's layouts/includes/assets with your site at build time. Primarily useful for GitHub Pages users who want to share themes across repos without maintaining a RubyGems release.
Pinning to a specific tag or commit (`@v1.0.0`) gives you reproducible builds, which is the right default for anything in production. The local path fallback (`../my-theme`) makes theme development actually workable instead of a push-and-pray cycle. Override semantics are straightforward — your local file wins, everything else falls through to the remote. The `@latest` convenience that hits the Releases API is a nice touch for users who want to track releases without manual updates.
Every build that hits the network is a latency bomb and a flakiness source — no caching means a slow or rate-limited GitHub download blocks your entire build. There's no integrity check on what gets downloaded, so a force-pushed tag silently changes your theme without any warning. The plugin is essentially a workaround for GitHub Pages not supporting local gem-based themes; if you're not on GitHub Pages, you'd be better off with a standard gem theme. 332 stars for something that's been around this long suggests the audience is narrow and the use case is narrowing further as GitHub Pages has loosened its restrictions.