Installing Ruby & Jekyll on Mac OS X

11:00AM — Saturday November 3, 2012.      Reading time ~2.0722222222222224min.

Because of my ignorance for Terminal, I struggled to install Ruby and Jekyll, so I’ve written some notes on that process. When I have to do it from scratch again, I’ll attempt to make them clearer.

I installed so much shit trying to get Jekyll installed, that I don’t really know what I did. But there was a couple of gotchas. So if I need to do it again, the rough process was what I’ve listed below. Along the way, this seemed to be the most straightforward guide I read.

Install Ruby and Dependencies

• Download and install Xcode from the Mac App Store. Xcode apparently used to come with Command Line Tools, but now you have to install them as an extra. Within Xcode, go to Preferences > Downloads, and install them. I installed Xcode figuring it came with these—I’m guessing I would have had Ruby installed earlier if I knew about this.
• Install Homebrew, a package manager. ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)" It lets you install stuff easily.
• Install RVM: Ruby Version Manager. This lets you switch versions of Ruby without affecting the system version. curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby.

Install and Run Jekyll

• The Jekyll Wiki is the best source of instructions for installation, but also templating and usage etc. Starting with Installation and moving on to Usage.
• Use gem install jekyll to install Jekyll. If you’ve got Ruby installed properly this should work.
• Once installed, you can run jekyll --server on a folder that is setup with Jekyll template files. If your _config.yml file doesn’t have server set to auto, you can additionally add it to this command: jekyll --server --auto.
• Hit up http://localhost:4000 and you should have a working site.

Command Line Alias

jekyll --server --auto is a long command to type each time. To make this shorter, open the file .bash_profile in your home directory and add an alias. Adding the line alias jsa='jekyll --server --auto'; means each time you want to run Jekyll you can simply type jsa.