Install jekyll and github-pages on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty

Task: install jekyll with github-pages extenshions on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty.

In trusty repositories maximum available ruby version is 1.9. Github Pages started using jekyll 3.0 on May 1st 2016 (see current dependencies and versions). It requires at least ruby 2.0.

Add ppa with stable ruby versions built by this guys and install it:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/ruby-ng; sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ruby2.3 ruby2.3-dev ruby-switch

With ruby-switch you can have multiple ruby versions installed and select one of them as default.

Now we have to install required gems. I don’t want to create chaos of ruby gems installed from debian packages and manually, so I prefer to keep all required gems in $HOME/.gem directory:

gem install github-pages --user-install --no-rdoc --no-ri

Now you can run jekyll with github-pages support. It may be convenient to create separate script for this and put it into root of your github pages repository:

#!/bin/bash
export PATH="$(ruby -rubygems -e 'puts Gem.user_dir')/bin:$PATH"
jekyll serve -w

To update your setup to latest github-pages version, you can just do

gem update github-pages --user-install --no-rdoc --no-ri