Tiernan's Comms Closet

Geek, Programmer, Photographer, network egineer…

Installing Jekyll on Bash On Ubuntu on Windows

At the 2016 Build conference, Microsoft announced that Bash on Ubuntu on Windows was coming. Well, it came out last week, and I installed it as soon as I could! My next challenge was to get Jekyll to run and install on it, so I can build and preview this site on my Surface Book.

So, first, I needed to install version 2.0 of Ruby. There is a bit of messing involved for this, but first

apt-get update
apt-get install ruby2.0

Now, when you run

ruby -v

you will still see ruby 1.9.x installed… and the github-pages gem, which includes Jekyll 3, requires ruby 2.0… ugh. after reading this very long bug report I got this:

# Rename original out of the way, so updates / reinstalls don't squash our hack fix
dpkg-divert --add --rename --divert /usr/bin/ruby.divert /usr/bin/ruby
dpkg-divert --add --rename --divert /usr/bin/gem.divert /usr/bin/gem
# Create an alternatives entry pointing ruby -> ruby2.0
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/ruby ruby /usr/bin/ruby2.0 1
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gem gem /usr/bin/gem2.0 1

Now, when I run ruby -v, I am told I am on version 2.0! Happy days! Next, i installed bundler using

gem install bundler

which uses a Gemfile to install the required gems, so running

bundle install

should install all required gems but no luck… I tried adding ruby2.0 dev to the mix

apt-get install ruby2.0-dev

but running jekyll from bash said it did not exist, and running

bundle exec jekyll build

failed with a memory issue… ugh…

Anyway, next, I tried

gem install github-pages -V

-v makes it verbose, so you can see what’s going on… after a bit of time, and lots of output to the screen…

jekyll build
bash: /usr/bin/jekyll: No such file or directory

FECK! So, after a bit more digging, i find that jekyll is actually in /usr/local/bin/jekyll

ln /usr/local/bin/jekyll /usr/bin/jekyll

solves that problem!

now running

jekyll build

works perfectly, as does

jekyll serve

HAPPY DAYS! Mind you, I am only using this as a testing and writing system. I have not tried s3_website just yet, but that is being sorted elsewhere anyway. Maybe my next post will explain that…

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This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.


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