Install Jekyll on Ubuntu

There’s quite a lot of info on how to install Jekyll on Ubuntu and most don’t work. Here’s how to install Jekyll on an Ubuntu Live USB.

This was tested on an Amazon EC2 running Ubuntu. Once SSH’d into the system:

sudo apt update
sudo apt -y upgrade
sudo reboot

Install Ruby development tools

sudo apt -y install make build-essential
sudo apt -y install ruby ruby-dev

We now need to instruct Ruby’s gem package manager to place gems in logged in user’s home directory. Add below line to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc depending on your shell,

export GEM_HOME=$HOME/gems
export PATH=$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH

Update Bundler

Navigate to the root directory of the Jekyll site (that contains the Gemfile) and run:

sudo gem install bundler
sudo gem install jekyll
sudo bundle update --bundler

For some Jekyll sites, if you get an error such as An error occurred while installing nokogiri (1.10.10), and Bundler cannot continue. Make sure that gem install nokogiri -v '1.10.10' --source 'https://rubygems.org/' succeeds before bundling., run sudo apt-get install build-essential patch ruby-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev

Done! Jekyll installed. Build your site and make it available on a local server:

bundle exec jekyll serve

Browse to http://localhost:4000

To server over an EC2 (for testing), run as

bundle exec jekyll serve --host=0.0.0.0