Setting Up Jekyll on Windows

2022-09-02

I’ve recently been playing around with using Windows 10 as my daily operating system. So far, it has been going fairly well. Nothing will probably ever feel as “optimized” as running a Linux-based system but it works well for my current needs. Getting a Jekyll development environment setup was a different story though…

One of the first issues with using Windows 10 is the need to run a few of my open source projects that are built off Jekyll locally. This process initially seemed a like complex process to get things running smoothly but in the end was very straightforward. The main issue came from needing to bounce around through a handful of separate tutorials to get everything running smoothly.

So, I thought I would make this quick write-up to help those in the same situation (or even for my future self the need arises). Let’s get into it.

WSL

The first step involves installing WSL in order to run Linux alongside the main Windows OS. The documentation is well written and will get you up-and-running in no time. For quick reference, it essentially comes down to:

1. Opening PowerShell or Command Prompt as an administrator
2. Installing via the command: wsl --install
3. Restarting your machine after the install completes
4. Creating your UNIX username and password

Installing Ruby & Dependencies

Once logged into your UNIX terminal session (with your created user) you can begin installing everything we need for Jekyll to work properly. The first step is to installing rvm and the official project documentation does a very good job of walking you through this.

• Be sure dependencies as installed: sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

• Add the PPA and install the package:

  sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:rael-gc/rvm sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install rvm

• Add your existing user to the rvm group: sudo usermod -a -G rvm $USER

You will need to close and restart your session to your Ubuntu system for these changes to take. After that, we can use rvm to install the latest version (at this time of writing) of ruby:

rvm install 3.1.2

That’s it!

Jekyll - Finally!

The final step is to update our gems and install Jekyll:

gem update
gem install jekyll bundler

Once complete you can now run your Jekyll projects locally through WSL! Nothing ground-breaking but still pretty helpful for first-time users. And best of all, at least I have a good reference point in the future if I ever run into this issue again!