Plugins are silently ignored and that costs users a lot of time

[errordeveloper]

I and many others spent hours debugging they plugins when running locally, please see https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/5265#issuecomment-241267253.

This is a UX problem, it should be easily fixable with big fat warning!

[benbalter]

We could provide warning-level build feedback e.g. "Notice: Custom plugins are disabled when previewing locally", but I think the better, more descriptive solution would be for Jekyll to warn when a plugin is requested but ignored.

[Giszmo]

If I forked a project that used the github-pages gem for github deployment but I don't want to github-deploy, how do I deactivate this "feature" of blocking plugins that are forbidden on a platform I'm not using?

I would want bundle exec jekyll serve --trace to print a big fat warning:

"There is files in the _plugins/ folder. Are you trying to use plugins? GitHub only allows a short list of plugins. If you want to override this limitation for local builds, do this little trick: ..."

[gojimmypi]

I too, have spent a bit of time trying to understand the jekyll "local vs GitHub" plugins. I found these tidbits that may help explain why some gh_pages just don't work as one might expect:

from https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#static-site-generators

GitHub Pages does not support server-side languages such as PHP, Ruby, or Python.

and

from https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll/about-github-pages-and-jekyll

GitHub Pages cannot build sites using unsupported plugins. If you want to use unsupported plugins, generate your site locally and then push your site's static files to GitHub.

As noted in https://github.com/github/pages-gem/issues/171#issuecomment-139332036 a list of supported plugins can be found here:

https://pages.github.com/versions/