Creating a Ruby-Jekyll Site

Akshita Dixit
2 min readOct 28, 2022

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Image Credits

I’m not very sure of why someone would read this, but I included this project in my article, hence thought of actually helping people set this up in case anyone wants to :p

The steps below are for windows, but for any person following this tut, it should be 10x easier to look up for the Linux version of these steps and get this thing working.

Installing Ruby and Gem

Do a quick and simple .msi install from https://rubyinstaller.org/ (download with devkit, assuming you’re new to Ruby). It comes with RubyGems, which is a package manager for the Ruby programming language that provides a standard format for distributing Ruby programs and libraries.

In the terminal/cmd/powershell or whatever you like to use in your power-packed Windows OS type gem and you should be able to see similar stuff that confirms successful installation of Ruby.

Installing Bundle and Jekyll

Now bundle is similar to npm or yarn because it saves you from cluttering up your project dependencies and helps in their easy installation. Check out more about it at https://bundler.io/

However for this setup, just do a gem install bundle and we will be ready to work.

Next Jekyll is a static site generator that converts your plain text to a webpage, pretty much the thing you might’ve “encountered and/or ignored” if you’ve worked with GitHub pages.

bundle install jekyll should work pretty smoothly and install this ruby-gem for you.

Creating the project

jekyll new . if you’re already in the directory you want the project to be created
or
jekyll new <path-to-dir>

and you should see very smoothly, all these files flood-up the concerned directory. To preview your site, run jekyll serve and in your web browser, navigate to http://localhost:4000

Explore around the directory and change stuff as you like. Add newer dependencies in the Gemfile and run a bundle install everytime you do to fetch them into your project.

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