Nicholas Studt

Installing ruby, rake, and jekyll 17 December 2012

This is how to install rbev, rake, and jekyll on an OS X, or *nix, machine to create a local testing version of your jekyll based website. The process was pretty simple once I stopped trying to deal with the local system ruby.

Install rbenv

Pull both the rbenv and ruby-build source.

git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git \
    ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build

Update your bash to include rbev and local gem files.

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$HOME/.gem/ruby/1.9.1/bin/:$PATH"' \
     >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bash_profile

Actually install ruby and change the global ruby, if you don't do this today you should probably pick a newer version.

rbenv install 1.9.3-p327
rbenv global  1.9.3-p327

Install jekyll

$ gem install --user-install rake
$ gem install --user-install jekyll

Assuming all of this completed successfully you should now have a system with a working version of jekyll, rake, and ruby that is independant of the system ruby.

The Payoff

$ git clone git@github.com:nicholasstudt/nicholasstudt.com.git
$ cd nicholasstudt.com
$ rake preview

Visit http://localhost:8080^neverworks to view a local version of the site. Yes, I know, jekyll defaults to port 4000 but 8080 calls to me like a siren song.

posted in *nix