Setting up Jekyll

Recently was able to experience the joy of setting up Jekyll and Github Pages in more detail through setting up an internal documentation hub at work.

Setting up Jekyll

What is Jekyll (to me). A system to automatically construct a website from simple markdown and structured data in the form of yaml that is ligh weight but very flexible.

A Friendly Template

An extremely helpful starting point is the template provided by Karl Broman. With great instructions on how to get started with Jekyll and Github Pages.

Ruby Update

Mac OSX default Ruby was many version behind what was needed for Jekyll. As of (2019-11-08) Current stable version of Ruby is 2.6.5.

I have not had much experience with [Ruby[(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)) - but a quick read makes it sound delightful, and I am interested in how to relate the design principles to a mathemtical theory of the cost of surprise / complexity in a code base.

Updating and setting the new version as the default.

curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
rvm install ruby-2.6.3
rvm --default use 2.6.3

Jekyll Setup

gem install jekyll bundler
cd <path_to_jekyll_data>
bundle install

Serving jekyll pages

bundle exec jekyll serve

For bundle install I was missing a source in the Gemfile. Following the helpful error message to addsource 'https://rubygems.org' resolved instantly.