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How to create a blog with GitHub Pages and Jekyll Part 2

June 11, 2016

How to use Jekyll for your site/blog on GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages uses Jekyll, “a simple, blog-aware, static site generator”, so let’s install it.

New way to install it

Since the creation of the post, it seems the recommended way to install Jekyll on Windows changed.

  1. Install the RubyInstaller for Windows (get the recommended Devkit version if you’re unsure). Install MSYS2 at the end of the wizard.

  2. Install Jekyll and bundler gems

    gem install jekyll bundler

  3. Create your new site (below named mysite) with

    jekyll new mysite

    This creates a director name mysite

  4. Go to the directory and build the site

    cd mysite
bundle exec jekyll serve
  5. You should see that your site is available at http://localhost:4000

If you’re on Linux or Mac

  1. Install Ruby, see more here
  2. Install Gem, the Ruby package manager, see more here

If you’re on Windows

  1. Install chocolatey (a package manager for Windows, similar to apt-get on Linux)

    Run in command line as admin:

    @powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

    To upgrade chocolatey in the future, run

    choco upgrade chocolatey

  2. Install ruby through chocolatey

    Open a new command line (not as admin) - you need to open a new command line, else chocolatey will not be available

    choco install ruby -y

    To upgrade ruby later on, run (it seems it needs admin rights)

    choco upgrade ruby

All systems

Now you just need to install Jekyll through Gem, the Ruby package manager Open a new command line (not as admin) - you need to open a new command line, else gem will not be available

gem install jekyll

After installing jekyll you may see:

MSYS2 could not be found. Please run ‘ridk install’ or download and install MSYS2 manually from https://msys2.github.io/

This is needed for installing gems with native extensions.

To upgrade jekyll later on, run

gem update jekyll

Now that Jekyll is installed, simply run the following at the root of your GitHub Pages repository

jekyll serve

It will create your static website and open a local webserver for you to test. Just head over to http://127.0.0.1:4000/ (or whatever address and port number is displayed by the jekyll serve command), and you should see the index of your website.

Check part 3 to write your first post.