Recently I migrated blog.just2us.com from a self hosted wordpress to Jekyll on Github Pages.
The steps I took for migration is very different from the previous guide on migrating from Blogger to Jekyll.
What’s wrong with Jekyll Import
Jekyll provided it’s own migration tool for Wordpress.
However, the tool has 2 major problems:
- it does not export the images
- it export the html wholesale, without converting to markdown
By not exporting the images, the tool depends on linking all images url back to to original site. That means after migration, you will need to maintain the original site in order for the images to work!
I wouldn’t want that, because my migration intend to keep the same base URL.
WP Plugin: Jekyll Exporter
Fortunately, there is a better way in the form of a Wordpress plugin.
Simply install the plugin, then go to Tools > Export to Jekyll. However, this likely wouldn’t work because of timeout etc.
The better way is ssh in and cd to the plugin directory eg. /var/www/just2us.com/wp-content/plugins/jekyll-exporter then run:
php jekyll-export-cli.php > jekyll-export.zip
If there is no error, then the zip will contain all the markdowns and images!
Encountered out of memory in PHP
For my case, I encountered the error:
PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 89391104 bytes)
There is a permanent and a temporary way to fix this, and I choose a temporary solution.
I edited jekyll-export-cli.php and added:
ini_set('memory_limit', '-1');
This will overide the default limit.
Now run php jekyll-export-cli.php > jekyll-export.zip again, and it should be fine.