Blogging with Jekyll (Part 1, Wrestling with Ruby)

This was supposed to be a post complaining about the standards, or lack thereof, applied by ThemeForest, to the Wordpress Themes they well. As I went to write it I noticed that TinyPress.co's SSL certificate had expired, so it seemed as good a time as any to dive into Jekyll and handle this static blogging with Github Pages myself.

What follows isn't a guide; it's just my log of the 600+ mistakes it took for me to get started using Jekyll. As such, it contains a lot of dead ends before I got it all working. In hindsight, it seems that I made things significantly more difficult by starting with TinyPress, instead of just RTFM for Jekyll and Github Pages myself. So much for shortcuts.

I started out well enough, using the Jekyll Installation Docs. They said the best way to install it was using RubyGems, which I hadn't used before, but seemed easy enough, so I ran the command:

$ gem install jekyll

And promptly got the response:

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
You don't have write permissions for the /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0 directory

With a little Googling and reading on the Jekyll Troubleshooting page, it turns out this is because, unsurprisingly, the system defaults to using the version of Ruby installed by Apple. The first workaround I tried was changing the location where the gem would be installed. I try to use /usr/local/bin for the binaries I install anyway, so this made sense:

$ gem install -n /usr/local/bin jekyll

Same error. And while the troubleshooting pages recommend running commands such as sudo gem update --system, sudo gem install jekyll, and sudo gem install -n /usr/local/bin jekyll I didn't want to mess around with the system version of Ruby, and knew that I shouldn't need to use sudo for this, if I set it up right.

The next step was to, following the advice on this SO page, install a Ruby version manager. I went with rbenv.

I've had a few bad experiences with Homebrew, so I decided to install it manually:

$ git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
$ cd ~/.rbenv && src/configure && make -C src

I followed the installation instructions provided through step 4 and it went smoothly (I added it to my $PATH, ran the init, and followed the instructions.) I ran: type rbenv to confirm the installation and it comes back as a function, so I thought I was golden. I try running the command to install Jekyll again... and get the same error.

Genius that I am, I had installed the Ruby version manager, but not any new versions of Ruby, so of course it was still using the system version. I go back to the instructions, read step 5, which was marked as (Optional), and realize that I need to install ruby-build, in order to easily add new versions of Ruby (as alternatives to using the system version). So, I run the installation:

$ git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build

Run the command to list available versions of Ruby to install:

$ rbenv install -l

And then install the most recent stable version:

$ rbenv install 2.2.4

Things go smoothly. I see that they're being installed to ~/.rbenv/versions/. I run the command to set the newer version to be used globally:

$ rbenv global 2.2.4

At this point, I needed to restart the terminal, and then finally, I was able to run the Jekyll install command successfully:

$ gem install -n /usr/local/bin jekyll

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