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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