After much deliberation, I decided to simplify my blogging workflow. To that end I made the switch from WordPress to Jekyll, which is ”a simple, blog aware, static site generator.” Although Jekyll is easy to maintain, it can be confusing to set up. Thankfully, there is a wealth of documentation available from developers who have also made the switch. With that in mind, I’d like to contribute my experience with installing Jekyll on OS X.
Getting Started
The consensus on the internet is to first install Xcode, which is available from the App Store. It will take a bit of time to download and install.
Once you’ve installed Xcode, the next step is to install Command Line Tools, which is available via the command line (naturally). Open up Terminal (or iTerm2) and enter the following:
xcode-select --install
After installing the Command Line Tools, install Homebrew, which is the missing package manager for OS X:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
The next step is to install RVM to help manage different versions of Ruby (although you won’t necessarily need to switch between versions):
\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
I had some difficulty installing Ruby from RVM, due to some missing dependencies. To fix this I had to find the missing packages:
rvm requirements
Which then necessitated running the following:
brew doctor
That led to some warnings about issues to fix, which you’ll need to Google and resolve yourself (as your issues are surely different than my own were).
After sorting that out, I was then able to install the list of missing dependencies:
brew install (and then the list of missing packages)
And then I was able to install Ruby:
rvm install 2.1.2
Which finally allowed me to install Jekyll:
gem install jekyll
Whew!
That wasn’t so bad, was it? It feels good to work through the install with the satisfaction of knowing that you did it without any help, save for the goodwill efforts of fellow developers and their documentation. High fives to that!