Installing Jekyll using the WSL

Thanks to the awesomeness that is the WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux, you can now install and use a load of tools on Windows just as you would do under Linux. Previously I used to run Jekyll (running under Ruby) solely through a Unix based environment - creating new blog posts through a system of SSH and SFTP. Ruby development on Windows has never really been that great, but now the whole process has got much easier - run everything locally through the WSL layer.

The first step is to install Ruby. Following the instructions from their site:

1. Install dependencies

sudo apt-get install git-core curl zlib1g-dev build-essential libssl-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev python-software-properties libffi-dev nodejs

2. Install Ruby via rvm

I had troubles installing Ruby via rbenv, but rvm seems to work just fine.

cd
curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
rvm install 3.0.1
rvm use 3.0.1 --default
ruby -v

(you will be prompted to enter your password a couple times for apt-get installs of requirements)

3. Install Bundler

gem install bundler

4. Install the Jekyll Gems

gem install jekyll
gem install jekyll-sitemap
gem install jekyll-paginate

5. Install the Pygments highlighter

(not needed if you are using the Rouge highlighter) Make sure you have Python and Pip installed first then:

sudo pip install pygments
gem install pygments.rb

6. Confirm the installation

jekyll -v

You should see output like

jekyll 3.9.1

7. Build and serve your site

jekyll serve --force_polling  --incremental