The alshedivat/al-folio repository is a widely adopted, open-source Jekyll theme designed for academics and research labs. It ships with opinionated layouts for publications, people, projects, blogs, and CVs, plus thoughtful touches like light/dark mode, math and code support, and social previews, so you can focus on content, not plumbing.
alshedivat
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al-folio
A beautiful, simple, clean, and responsive Jekyll theme for academicsWhy it exists
Many researchers, educators, and labs need a fast, maintainable website that looks professional, loads quickly, and showcases scholarship, without a custom stack or CMS overhead. al-folio tackles that problem by providing a production-ready Jekyll theme with Markdown-first authoring, BibTeX-powered publications, and sensible defaults for navigation, typography, and SEO.
Jekyll is a static site generator, often described as a "file-based CMS" or a "blog-aware static site generator." While it handles content and website structure similar to a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal, it operates fundamentally differently.
The solution in practice
Out of the box, you get a complete site structure with sections for news, a blog, publications, projects, repositories, a CV, teaching, and people. Configuration lives in _config.yml, content lives in collections (like _posts, _projects, _pages), and most of the heavy lifting is done by Liquid templates in _layouts and _includes. You can deploy to GitHub Pages or Docker with minimal setup (see INSTALL.md), then customize styling via SCSS.
Key features worth calling out
Publications are generated from BibTeX using jekyll-scholar. Add entries in _bibliography/papers.bib and the theme renders citation info, badges, and links.
The CV can be sourced from a JSON Resume file at assets/json/resume.json or fall back to the readable YAML at _data/cv.yml, configured in _config.yml.
Blog posts support Distill-style layouts, tabs, galleries, math, mermaid, and charts. There’s built-in dark mode, Atom feeds, related posts, and a repositories page powered by github-readme-stats and github-profile-trophy.
Under the hood
al-folio is mostly HTML, Liquid, SCSS, and a dash of JavaScript. The project emphasizes clean typography, responsive design, and build-time generation, which keeps hosting cheap and performance excellent.
You can theme colors by tweaking SCSS variables in _sass/_variables.scss or changing the global color in _sass/_themes.scss. Enable Open Graph previews by setting a flag in the config.
serve_og_meta: true
# Pick a brand color in your SCSS theme file
# _sass/_themes.scss: set --global-theme-color
Getting started is straightforward: clone or template the repo, edit _config.yml, add your content, and deploy. The maintainers provide Docker
and GitHub Pages options for local and production builds, and the repository includes checks for formatting and links via Prettier and Lychee.
Real-world examples (3 per category)
- Academics: maruan.alshedivat.com, platanios.org, otiliastr.github.io
- Labs: Hay Lab (Caltech), SAILING Lab, Decision Lab (UCSF)
- Courses: CMU PGM (S-19), CMU DeepRL (F-23), CMU Distributed Systems (S-24)
- Conferences & Workshops: ICLR Blog Posts (2024), Neural Compression (ICLR 2021), Workshop on Diffusion Models (NeurIPS 2023)
Community and contribution
The repository is active and community-driven with hundreds of contributors. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md and the Discussions tab. If you’re new to Jekyll, the README links to a good primer, and the FAQ.md is handy for common questions.
Usage and license terms
al-folio is released under the MIT License. In short, you can use, copy, modify, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell the software, provided you include the copyright and license notice. There’s no warranty use it as-is.
About the maintainers
The project was created by Maruan Al‑Shedivat and is maintained by a team including Rohan Deb Sarkar, Amir Pourmand, and George, with contributions from a broad community. There’s even an official Docker image to simplify local builds.
Impact and what’s next
Because it embraces static-site simplicity, al-folio scales from a single scholar page to lab sites and course hubs. The defaults encourage good information architecture, accessible design, and fast performance, while the templates reduce time-to-first-publish. With active contributors and a vibrant showcase of real deployments, the theme looks well positioned to keep evolving, especially around richer content blocks, improved accessibility checks, and deeper integrations.
Wrap-up
If you need an academic website that looks sharp and stays easy to maintain, start here. Explore the live demo, read through the repo, drop your publications into BibTeX, and ship. Your future self and your readers, will thank you.
Live demo: alshedivat.github.io/al-folio · Repository: github.com/alshedivat/al-folio
al-folio: A Jekyll Theme That Makes Academic Sites Feel Effortless