Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator. It is built for Linux and Mac OS and not guaranteed to work on Windows or officially supported. I’ve followed this link to setup Jekyll on Windows 10, but added some more detail and excluded some others in this post. Here’s how you set it up.

Install Ruby & configure

Get Ruby from the Ruby download page. I couldn’t get my setup working using Ruby 2.4.2-2 (x64), so I had to revert to Ruby 2.3.3 (x64). I prefer to use portable versions wherever I can, so I chose to download the 7-zip archive. Also download Ruby Development kit.

It’s best to create a folder with no space and install (or unzip) to it. I used C:\RUBY.

I also hesitate of permanently add folders to my Windows PATH environment variable, so I create a bacth file that I execute before I do a Jekyll session. It’s a simple file that just needs to contain the path to the needed executables. Create a file called, say env2.3.3.bat that contains the following:

SET PATH=%PATH%;C:\RUBY\RubyDevKit\bin;C:\RUBY\ruby-2.3.3-x64-mingw32\bin

Run it before proceeding. Run this each time you want to run Jekyll. Next, initialize the DevKit and bind it to your Ruby installation. Navigate to the C:\RUBY\RubyDevKit folder and run

ruby dk.rb init

This will generate a file config.yml in this folder. Open this file and add the path to the Ruby installation. Note to change the slashes to a forward slash.

Install the DevKit, binding it to your Ruby installation.

ruby dk.rb install

Install Gems

Ruby has a package manager called Gems. We use this to install the Jekyll and bundler gems:

gem install jekyll
gem install bundler

If you are using GitHub pages to host your site, you need to make sure the Jekyll plugins you use are supported by GitHub Pages. Verify this at GitHub Pages gem. Refer to the relevant GitHub page on this too.

On Use with Github Pages Gem: The Github Pages gem ignores all plugins included in the Gemfile. If you only include a plugin say, jekyll-sitemap in the Gemfile without also including it in the _config.yml the plugin will not work. This can be confusing because the official Jekyll docs state that plugins can be included in either the Gemfile or _config.yml.

Build the site

Get a Jekyll site from say, Jekyll Themes. In a commnd prompt, go to the folder of the site you just downloaded. It ought to look something like this:

Run:

bundle exec jekyll serve

If you see the message below:

Run the command as requested

bundle install

Once it’s completed, run:

bundle exec jekyll serve

Navigate to the URL shown and you should see the static site:

You can update your bundle & gems once a while using

gem update

or if Bundler is installed, run

bundle update

And that’s it!