If you’re using the Ruby Gem or remote theme versions of Minimal Mistakes, upgrading is fairly painless.

To check which version you are currently using, view the source of your built site and you should see something similar to:

<!--
  Minimal Mistakes Jekyll Theme 4.26.2 by Michael Rose
  Copyright 2013-2024 Michael Rose - mademistakes.com | @mmistakes
  Free for personal and commercial use under the MIT license
  https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes/blob/master/LICENSE
-->

At the top of every .html file, /assets/css/main.css, and /assets/js/main.min.js.

Ruby Gem

Simply run bundle update if you’re using Bundler (have a Gemfile) or gem update minimal-mistakes-jekyll if you’re not.

When using Bundler you can downgrade or lock the theme to a specific release (tag), branch, or commit. Instead of gem "minimal-mistakes-jekyll" you’d add the following to your Gemfile:

gem "minimal-mistakes-jekyll", :git => "https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes.git", :tag => "4.26.2"

For more information on installing gems from Git repositories consult Bundler’s documentation.

Remote theme

When setting remote_theme: "mmistakes/minimal-mistakes@4.26.2" in your _config.yml you may also optionally specify a branch, tag, or commit to use by appending an @ and the Git ref.

For example, you can roll back to release 4.8.1 with mmistakes/minimal-mistakes@4.8.1 or a specific commit with mmistakes/minimal-mistakes@bbf3cbc5fd64a3e1885f3f99eb90ba92af84063d). For a complete list of theme versions consult the releases page.

To update the theme on GitHub Pages you’ll need to push up a commit to force a rebuild. An empty commit works well if you don’t have anything to push at the moment:

git commit --allow-empty -m "Force rebuild of site"

Use Git

If you want to get the most out of the Jekyll + GitHub Pages workflow, then you’ll need to utilize Git. To pull down theme updates you must first ensure there’s an upstream remote. If you forked the theme’s repo then you’re likely good to go.

To double check, run git remote -v and verify that you can fetch from origin https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes.git.

To add it you can do the following:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes.git

Pull down updates

Now you can pull any commits made to theme’s master branch with:

git pull upstream master

Depending on the amount of customizations you’ve made after forking, there’s likely to be merge conflicts. Work through any conflicting files Git flags, staging the changes you wish to keep, and then commit them.

Update files manually

Another way of dealing with updates is downloading the theme — replacing your layouts, includes, and assets with the newer ones manually. To be sure that you don’t miss any changes it’s probably a good idea to review the theme’s commit history to see what’s changed since.

Here’s a quick checklist of the important folders/files you’ll want to be mindful of:

Name  
_layouts Replace all. Apply edits if you customized any layouts.
_includes Replace all. Apply edits if you customized any includes.
assets Replace all. Apply edits if you customized stylesheets or scripts.
_sass Replace all. Apply edits if you customized Sass partials.
_data/navigation.yml Safe to keep. Verify that there were no major structural changes or additions.
_data/ui-text.yml Safe to keep. Verify that there were no major structural changes or additions.
_config.yml Safe to keep. Verify that there were no major structural changes or additions.

Note: If you’re not seeing the latest version, be sure to flush browser and CDN caches. Depending on your hosting environment older versions of /assets/css/main.css, /assets/js/main.min.js, or *.html may be cached.

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