A lot of the work that I do is on Windows machines, and I spend an awful lot of time in shells of one sort or another. My shell host of choice is the excellent conemu. You can download an installer, or use chocolatey to install and maintain the latest version.

However for various reasons (which I might get round to documenting one day :) ), I use a linux vm to run some stuff, including Jekyll. When using Jekyll you have it serve a directory:

jekyll serve

The problem with doing this is that it binds to the local loopback address (localhost/127.0.0.1). Which is fine if you’re running a desktop on that machine and can fire up a browser; but slightly limiting when all you have is a text terminal. To be able to access Jekyll externally you need to tell it to bind to a different host, this is easy:

jekyll server -H 192.168.1.1

But this is a lot to remember, and type everytime, especially when you have a finite number of keypresses. So what do we need? An Alias! Luckily searching turned up a couple of key resources:

What I hadn’t realised from the ss64 page (an excellent command line resource), is that the .bash_aliases file isn’t actually interpreted, but is simply executed as part of the .bashrc script (which is why I ended up with the Raspberry Pi documentation). Anyway, by aliasing jekyll to itself with the necessary parameters:

jekyll='jekyll server -H 192.168.1.1'

I’m now able to run jekyll with the correct binding just using the jekyll command.