Jekyll installation

Wednesday. July 03, 2019 - 4 mins

Overview:

Following GitHub Pages + Jekyll 创建个人博客 to install Jekll on Windows, I found the guide was out-of-date in the Chinese official Jekyll website where its content has not been updated for 3 years (2016). So I turned to its original official site for the installation guide.

Windows:

1. Download and Install Ruby+Devkit

Download and Install a Ruby+Devkit version from RubyInstaller Downloads. Use default options for installation. It will pop up a installation terminal window, type 1 and ENTER. After the installaion process, ENTER again, the windown will disappear.

After this step, you can check if Ruby and RubyGems are properly installed in the command prompt window:

ruby -v
gem -v

2. Install Jekyll

gem install jekyll bundler

Check if Jekyll installed properly:

jekyll -v

Jekyll official site has a list of requirements:

Ruby ✔️

RubyGems ✔️

GCC and Make (gcc -v, g++ -v and make -v) ❌

But it is good to go anyways.

Mac

If you run:

gem install jekyll bundler

You will get an error:

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
    You don't have write permissions for the /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.3.0 directory.

The reason can be found in Stackoverflow.

1. rbenv

Github: rbenv

(1) Install rbenv.

brew install rbenv

Note that this also installs ruby-build, so you’ll be ready to install other Ruby versions out of the box.

(2) Set up rbenv in your shell.

rbenv init

Follow the printed instructions to set up rbenv shell integration.

(3) Close your Terminal and open a new one so your changes take effect.

(4) Verify that rbenv is properly set up using this rbenv-doctor script:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/raw/master/bin/rbenv-doctor | bash

That’s it! Installing rbenv includes ruby-build, so now you’re ready to install some other Ruby versions using rbenv install.

(5) Upgrading with Homebrew

To upgrade to the latest rbenv and update ruby-build with newly released Ruby versions, upgrade the Homebrew packages:

brew upgrade rbenv ruby-build

2. Jekyll

Official Instruction:

(1) Install ruby

rbenv install 2.6.3
rbenv global 2.6.3
ruby -v

(2) Install Jekyll: Local Install

gem install --user-install bundler jekyll
ruby -v

After getting the version of ruby, append your path file with the following, replacing the X.X with the first two digits of your Ruby version.

export PATH=$HOME/.gem/ruby/X.X.0/bin:$PATH

check that GEM PATHS: points to a path in your home directory:

gem env

Requirements:

Ruby version 2.4.0 or above, including all development headers (ruby version can be checked by running ruby -v)

RubyGems (which you can check by running gem -v)

GCC and Make (in case your system doesn’t have them installed, which you can check by running gcc -v,g++ -v and make -v in your system’s command line interface)

3. Trouble shooting

rbenv not changing ruby version:

export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"

Write this to the last setting in your ~/.bash_profile.

Bundler::GemNotFound

Could not find gem 'github-pages' in any of the gem sources listed in your Gemfile. (Bundler::GemNotFound)

bundle install

Gem::LoadError when jekyll s

bundle exec jekyll serve

Jekyll usage

source ~/.bashrc
cd $web
bundle exec jekyll serve

Go to the directory of your website and build a server.

JekyllAdmin mode: production
Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000
Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

According to the message, you can test your web in your sever with http://127.0.0.1:4000, and ctrl-c to stop.

open http://127.0.0.1:4000

ctrl-z suspend and fg to come back

Next steps:

Read Command Line Usage and Tutorial, Cheatsheet, Rmarkdown support

Zhijian Liu

A foodaholic