Some notes on building a Jekyll-based website 🍺🐍

Technical Aspects

1. Install Jekyll

See installation instructions for multiple OS's:

• Specifically, on Ubuntu:

Make sure Ruby>2.4 is installed, eg on an older Ubuntu 18.04 update the PPA:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/ruby-ng && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ruby2.5 ruby2.5-dev

then install jekyll and bundler:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential zlib1g-dev  # don't install ruby if you already did
echo '# Install Ruby Gems to ~/gems' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export GEM_HOME="$HOME/gems"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
gem install jekyll bundler

You can check if it works with jekyll --version

2. Note on bundler

You may have an older version of bundler (incompatible), to upgrade it run:

gem install bundler:1.17.1

and check version with bundle --version

3. Install dependencies and build the site

Once you have a website repository, initiate the jekyll-ification with:

jekyll new my-site-repo

then

cd my-site-repo

and install the dependencies with

bundle install

then you can now build the site with

bundle exec jekyll build

4. Installing missing gems

For instance, if you decide to use a new gem, e.g. jekyll-seo-tag you can install it in your gems environment with:

gem install jekyll-seo-tag

and remember to include it in the Gemfile, like here, vim Gemfile:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'jekyll'

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'jekyll-gist'
  gem 'jekyll-paginate'
  gem "jekyll-asciidoc"
  gem "jekyll-seo-tag"
end

gem 'asciidoctor', '~> 1.5.4'
gem 'coderay', '1.1.1'

5. Toy website (valeriupredoi pages, lots of Porsche 956C and 962C)

This is a sandbox (toy) website built by me, with a Feeling Responsive base, see the modified source.

The Feeling Responsive base template can be forked or gitballed from its source and set up for the ISENES3 website needs.

6. Building Jekyll from Docker

WARNING: I had issues with permissions with this type of installation!

Use the Jekyll container and specifically, run:

export JEKYLL_VERSION=3.8
docker run --rm \
  --volume="$PWD:/srv/jekyll" \
  -it jekyll/jekyll:$JEKYLL_VERSION \
  jekyll build

or see jekyll-container-build.sh here. Note that you will need to install docker if you don't already have it, and most probably use it with sudo permissions (as root).

Run: sudo docker run jekyll/jekyll --help