Jekyll Setup Ruby

Jekyll setup is advertised as being as simple as:

~ $ gem install jekyll
~ $ jekyll new my-awesome-site
~ $ cd my-awesome-site
~/my-awesome-site $ jekyll serve
# => Now browse to http://localhost:4000

It's not quite that easy, but it's close...real close. :-)

Jekyll is, and I quote:

Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator.

So true. For those who are puristic at heart, and love the Keep It Simple philosophy, these words are like music to the ear. Finally, a way to keep a web page up to date using only a text editor, if one is so inclined. Okay, enough of the dribble, let's get to the setup basics.

Jekyll is written in Ruby a highly object oriented language which likely needs no introduction. (However, if it does, I recommend "Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Progammers' Guide.") So, to run Jekyll you need ruby on your machine. I use Ubuntu as my primary OS so I needed Ruby on my laptop and VPS to begin using Jekyll.

First, let's discuss the development machine, my laptop, we'll come back to my VPS at on another post. I searched around and found that installing the debian package of ruby was not recommended, as it was old and apparently not well maintained. This seems odd to me, seeing that ruby is pretty cutting edge these days, as well as being extremely popular if stackoverflow is any indication. I found some instructions online that recommended not installing ruby into a more traditional /bin/ location but rather in the user's home directory. This sounded familiar to the last post about the node.js requirements so I was a little hesitant, but found that the ruby solution is much less intrusive. I had read that the best plan of attack for node.js is to chown the /usr/local directory to either your user account or some other user account that will be in your group. This just didn't ring true to me, so I shyed away from it, more because I feared hosing my system accidentally.

I found that ruby was already on my system, so I removed it completely with no deliterious effects.

# I like to use dpkg to examine my system, but go back to
# aptitude to do the installation and removal if at all possible
sudo dpkg --list | grep gem
# read through the packages installed that match 'gems' and remove
# the ruby ones
sudo apt-get remove rubygems
# read through the packages installed that match 'ruby' and remove
# one at a time, just for a little more fine grained control
sudo dpkg --list | grep ruby
sudo apt-get remove ruby
sudo apt-get remove ruby1.8
sudo apt-get remove ruby1.8-dev
sudo apt-get remove libruby1.8

This gave me a machine clean of old, unwanted ruby installs. Then to install ruby the "right" way, I used:

# get the ruby virtual machine via curl(who'd a thunk it?)
curl -L get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --auto
# make a backup of your .bashrc file
# this is due to a difference in Ubuntu releases .profile
# and .bash_profile behaviour  The ultimate goal is to get
# ruby initialized correctly for every terminal instance.
# Since there are subtle differences in .profile and .bash_profile
# I found it easiest to just add the ruby initilization lines
# to the end of my bashrc
cp .bashrc bash.bashrc
cat .bash_profile >> .bashrc

That worked! So now I can close my terminal and start a new one. Then test for the right Ruby Virtual Machine install.

which rvm
    /home/macduff/.rvm/bin/rvm

Perfetto! Now, get the rvm requirement and install any packages via apt-get.

# this will run an automated process to download and install
# some required software, it may complain about not being root,
# but that can be ignored for now
rvm requirements
sudo apt-get install build-essential openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev
curl git-core zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev
sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake
libtool bison  subversion pkg-config

I think I had all of the above, but thought I would repeat it just for completeness. Now, just setup rvm to behave and test its output.

 rvm install 1.9.3
 rvm use 1.9.3
 ruby -v
     ruby 1.9.3p448 (2013-06-27 revision 41675) [i686-linux]
 # note the build number and set it as default
 rvm --default use 1.9.3-p448
 which gem
     /home/macduff/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p448/bin/gem

Magnifico! Now we're ready to install Jekyll.

 gem install jekyll
 jekyll new myblog
 cd myblog
 jekyll serve # => Now browse to http://localhost:4000

If all goes well, you'll bring up a plain, but nice default Jekyll blog all ready for you to start blogging!

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