Installing Jekyll on Ubuntu 8.10

Published on Monday, 02 March 2009.

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. Probably because I don't know Ruby, it took me a considerable amount of time to set up, so I thought this could be useful for a person in a similar situation.

Assuming you don't even have Ruby:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby ruby1.8-dev rdoc1.8

Install Python pygments for highlighting your source code:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pygments

For some reason, gem didn't install any of the dependencies for mojombo-jekyll, so I did it manually, but later found out that I needed to add the github repository:

$ sudo gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

// now install Jekyll with dependencies auto-installed
$ sudo gem install mojombo-jekyll -s http://gems.github.com/

I was migrating from Wordpress, so I had to do the following to convert my posts to Jekyll:

$ sudo gem install sequel
$ sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev 
$ sudo gem install mysql
$ export DB=my_wordpress_db
$ export USER=dbuser
$ export PASS=dbpass
$ ruby -r '/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mojombo-jekyll-0.4.1/lib/jekyll/converters/wordpress' -e 'Jekyll::WordPress.process( \
 "#{ENV["DB"]}", "#{ENV["USER"]}", "#{ENV["PASS"]}")'

After all that package management, when I ran Jekyll for the first time, I got several error messages from Maruku. I went for the best option and installed the alternative: RDiscount.

$ sudo gem install rdiscount

Finally, I was able to view the generated site. After this oddisey I needed a rest, so I shutted down the computer and went to sleep.

Next, you will want the "Related posts" feature. I advice you to install the following (and save some headaches):

// You could also add these packages to the initial apt-get install
$ sudo apt-get install gsl-bin libgsl0-dev

Then, you need to install the Ruby GSL package from http://rb-gsl.rubyforge.org/. Extract the rb-gsl-xxx.tar.gz file and:

$ cd rb-gsl-xxx/
$ ruby setup.rb config
$ ruby setup.rb setup
$ sudo ruby setup.rb install

However, apparently the classifier gem has a bug, a quick google search produced: Patch for `build_reduced_matrix': uninitialized constant Classifier::LSI::Matrix (NameError) but I opted for a slighly different code:

if $GSL
  u * GSL::Matrix.diag( s ) * v.trans
else 
  u * Matrix.diag( s ) * v.trans
end

Now, when you run Jekyll with the --lsi switch, it is like 100x faster. (I might be exagerating.)

If you want a go at styling the pygmentized code, you can get a base style by executing:

$ pygmentize -f html -S colorful -a .highlight > syntax.css

Finally, this is how I run Jekyll:

// For writing/developing
$ jekyll --pygments --rdiscount

// For previewing the site (but I prefer to setup an apache vhost)
$ jekyll --pygments --rdiscount --server

// Final site generation
$ jekyll --lsi --pygments --rdiscount

Installing Jekyll on Ubuntu 8.10

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