Jekyll Tantrums
In the last few months, I had to switch laptops twice and get Jekyll up and running on both of them. While the instructions on Jekyll webpage get you started, they are not of much help in dealing with the issues that you encounter while setting up Jekyll.
Ruby tantrums
Jekyll requires Ruby. It can be installed with the command:
sudo apt install ruby-full
This typically installs a version that is not the latest. But, it shouldn’t be an issue as long as it is 2.5.0 or higher. So, as on today, Ruby version is not an issue.
To check the version number, run ruby -v. If you are lucky, you
will get the desired output. If you are not that lucky, as I was
today, you need to see where Ruby installed by running the command:
which ruby
Usually, the output of this command will be \usr\bin\ruby, and
sometimes, it can be \usr\local\bin\ruby. You can now get the
Ruby version by including the above path in the command:
/usr/bin/ruby -v #If Ruby is installed at \usr\bin
/usr/local/bin/ruby -v #If Ruby is installed at \usr\local\bib
You can also find the version number by looking at the Ruby binaries.
ls /usr/bin | grep ruby
In my case, I get ruby and ruby2.5 as output. Running ruby2.5 -v
gives me Ruby’s version number.
gem tantrums
We install Jekyll by running the following command:
gem install jekyll
If this fails, which is usually the case in my experience, we again look at the binaries.
ls /usr/bin | grep gem
This gives gem and gem2.5, and some other stuff. This output tells
us that we have to use gem2.5 instead of gem. Now, install Jekyll and
bundler by running the following commands.
gem2.5 install jekyll
gem2.5 install bundler
The following commands will complete the Jekyll set up process.
sudo gem2.5 update --system
bundle update
Now, navigate to the root folder of your blog and serve it locally to ensure that things are fine.
bundle exec jekyll serve
That’s it!