Here I gather notes on how I installed Jekyll for Github pages based mostly on informations from Github's help page.

Installing¶

Ruby and RubyGems as first prerequisite¶

• Ruby 1.9.3 is required (as of now)
• installing rubygems directly only installs Ruby 1.8.x => need to install ruby manually
• to list installed packages via APT, you can use sudo dpkg --get-selections
  • source http://akyl.net/how-list-all-installed-packages-ubuntu-centos-and-other-linux-systems
• ruby-dev package seems required to build gem github-pages
  • otherwise, you might get an error :
  • resource : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7645918/require-no-such-file-to-load-mkmf-loaderror

    ERROR:  Error installing github-pages:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

          /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1 extconf.rb
          /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require': cannot load such file -- mkmf (LoadError)
            from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
            from extconf.rb:1:in `<main>'

• installation

sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1
sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-dev

• Under Ubuntu 12.04 on my XPS 13, ruby 1.8 is the default alternative. To force 1.9.1 :

sudo unlink /etc/alternatives/ruby
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1 /etc/alternatives/ruby

• RubyGems
• Under Ubuntu 12.04 on my XPS 13, there seems to be an already install rubygems 1.8.11, which was not installed via apt-get

sudo apt-get install rubygems

Jekyll¶

  sudo gem install jekyll

GitHub Pages¶

  sudo gem install github-pages

Rake¶

Rake is a build tool that we can use to automate several blog editing task

  sudo gem install rake

• Rake build file is name Rakefile and is written in pure Ruby

Using Jekyll¶

Run the command below on the root of your GitHub pages clone

• starts jekyll to diplay posts AND draft and watch for changes
• jekyll can then be stoped with CTRL+C
• by default website is visible on http://localhost:4000

jekyll serve --draft --watch