Learn how to – How To Install Jekyll on Debian 11 / Debian 10

Learn how to – How To Install Jekyll on Debian 11 / Debian 10.

How to install Jekyll on Debian 11 / Debian 10 Linux?. Jekyll is one of the most popular static site generators with all features you’ll need in a Content Management System (CMS). Its key focus in performance and security, unlike other database-driven CMS systems. With Jekyll, you can transform your plain text files into static websites and blogs in seconds.

Jekyll Features

Jekyll is Simple:  You don’t need to understand database administration, comment moderation, or pesky updates to install – just your content.

Fit for Static content: You can use Markdown, Liquid, HTML & CSS go in. Static sites come out ready for deployment on a web server of your choice.

Jekyll is Blog-aware: It handles Permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts pretty well.

In this tutorial, we will install Jekyll on Debian 11 / Debian 10 Linux and create a sample website. We will also cover content generation, then publish and deploy to production.

Step 1 — Install Jekyll on Debian 11 / Debian 10

We will start by updating all system packages to the latest releases. Then proceed to install Jekyll.

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y upgrade -y
[ -f /var/run/reboot-required ] && sudo reboot -f

Jekyll requires a working Ruby development environment which includes libraries. Use the following commands to install Jekyll and required build tools.

sudo apt -y install make build-essential

Install Ruby package and development tools:

sudo apt -y install ruby ruby-dev

We now need to instruct Ruby’s gem package manager to place gems in logged in user’s home directory. Add below line to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc depending on your shell,

export GEM_HOME=$HOME/gems
export PATH=$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH

Now source your .bashrc|.zshrc file for the changes to take effect.

#Bash
source ~/.bashrc

#Zsh
source ~/.zshrc

Once this has been done, will use gem to install Jekyll and Bundler which is a tool used to manage Gem dependencies.

$ gem install bundler
Fetching bundler-2.4.4.gem
Successfully installed bundler-2.4.4
Parsing documentation for bundler-2.4.4
Installing ri documentation for bundler-2.4.4
Done installing documentation for bundler after 0 seconds
1 gem installed

Install Jekyll on Debian 11 / Debian 10

$ gem install jekyll

Confirm installation by checking the version:

$ jekyll --version
jekyll 4.3.1

Step 2 – Creating a new website with Jekyll

Now that all required things have been set, let’s proceed to add a site for Jekyll. For this, we will use the command jekyll new site.This will initiate bundle installation of required dependencies with a default Jekyll theme. After a successful installation, you should see output like:

$ jekyll new blog.ownyourlife.com.ng
Running bundle install in /root/blog.ownyourlife.com.ng...
  Bundler: Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/............
  Bundler: Resolving dependencies...
  Bundler: Fetching rake 13.0.6
  Bundler: Installing rake 13.0.6
  Bundler: Using bundler 2.4.4
  Bundler: Using public_suffix 5.0.1
  Bundler: Using colorator 1.1.0
  Bundler: Using eventmachine 1.2.7
  Bundler: Using http_parser.rb 0.8.0
  Bundler: Using ffi 1.15.5
  Bundler: Using forwardable-extended 2.6.0
  Bundler: Using google-protobuf 3.21.12 (x86_64-linux)
  Bundler: Using rb-fsevent 0.11.2
  Bundler: Fetching rexml 3.2.5
  Bundler: Using concurrent-ruby 1.1.10
  Bundler: Using liquid 4.0.4
  Bundler: Using mercenary 0.4.0
  Bundler: Using rouge 4.0.1
  Bundler: Using safe_yaml 1.0.5
  Bundler: Using unicode-display_width 2.4.2
  Bundler: Using webrick 1.7.0
  Bundler: Using addressable 2.8.1
  Bundler: Using em-websocket 0.5.3
  Bundler: Using sass-embedded 1.57.1
  Bundler: Using rb-inotify 0.10.1
  Bundler: Using pathutil 0.16.2
  Bundler: Using i18n 1.12.0
  Bundler: Using jekyll-sass-converter 3.0.0
  Bundler: Using listen 3.8.0
  Bundler: Using terminal-table 3.0.2
  Bundler: Using jekyll-watch 2.2.1
  Bundler: Installing rexml 3.2.5
  Bundler: Using kramdown 2.4.0
  Bundler: Using kramdown-parser-gfm 1.1.0
  Bundler: Using jekyll 4.3.1
  Bundler: Fetching jekyll-feed 0.17.0
  Bundler: Fetching jekyll-seo-tag 2.8.0
  Bundler: Installing jekyll-feed 0.17.0
  Bundler: Installing jekyll-seo-tag 2.8.0
  Bundler: Fetching minima 2.5.1
  Bundler: Installing minima 2.5.1
  Bundler: Bundle complete! 7 Gemfile dependencies, 34 gems now installed.
  Bundler: Use `bundle info [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.Don't run Bundler as root. Installing your bundle as root will break this application for all non-root users on this machine.
New jekyll site installed in /root/blog.ownyourlife.com.ng.

A directory will be created with Jekyll source files used to create a static site:

$ sudo apt -y install tree
$ tree blog.ownyourlife.com.ng/
blog.ownyourlife.com.ng/
├── 404.html
├── about.markdown
├── _config.yml
├── Gemfile
├── Gemfile.lock
├── index.markdown
└── _posts
    └── 2023-01-18-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown

1 directory, 7 files

Note that you have to cd to this directory before you can start using it.

cd blog.ownyourlife.com.ng/

Jekyll’s built-in lightweight web server will serve content on port 4000. If you have firewall service enabled, allow access to this port:

sudo ufw allow 4000

Jekyll is designed to support live development by automatically detecting changes of files and automatically regenerating the static site whenever a change is saved.

Step 3: Start Jekyll Server on Debian

To start Jekyll built-in web service, navigate to site directory and start Jekyll web server using jekyll serve command followed by host IP address to bind to.

$ cd ~/blog.ownyourlife.com.ng
$ jekyll serve --host=0.0.0.0
Configuration file: /home/debian/blog.ownyourlife.com.ng/_config.yml
             Source: /home/debian/blog.ownyourlife.com.ng
        Destination: /home/debian/blog.ownyourlife.com.ng/_site
  Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
       Generating… 
        Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
                     done in 0.152 seconds.
  Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/home/debian/blog.ownyourlife.com.ng'
     Server address: http://0.0.0.0:4000/
   Server running… press ctrl-c to stop.

When jekyll serve command is executed, Jekyll will parse configuration and pushes content files into a directory called  _site. It then serves the content in this  _site directory:

$ ls -1 _site/
404.html
about
assets
feed.xml
index.html
jekyll

Jekyll will also watch for new changes on ~/blog.ownyourlife.com.ng directory when a change to a post or page is saved, it will automatically rebuild the static site. Place all site posts under the _posts directory.

Visit server’s IP address and port 4000 to see default web page.

If you are using Web server like Nginx or Apache, you need to copy content inside _site/ to its Web document root. Read more on Jekyll Documentation.

More on CMS:

• Install Drupal on Debian
• Install Drupal on CentOS 8
• Install Hugo on Debian / Ubuntu
• Install Ghost CMS on Ubuntu / CentOS