Setting up a website with Jekyll

Posted by on July 06, 2019 · 1 min read

Why a guide?

You may be asking why I am making a guide for setting up a website using Jekyll. Normally, I wouldn’t do such a thing, especially with something that is considered a simple and easy task. However, while setting it up was easy, installing and using a theme of my choice was a complete pain. Required a couple hours of googling, frustration, and patience. I decided for my first post, I would give a guide in hopes that if someone is like me, they can avoid the hours of frustration.

Who this is for

This guide, while containing a decent amount of information, should be used as a companion to another guide. This is due to the fact that other guides will focus on operating systems other than Ubuntu, and will probably explain things better. Hopefully, this guide will just reiterate things already stated and help someone with the very specific parts I was having troubles with.

Getting Jekyll and setting up

To use Jekyll, one must have Jekyll. The Jekyll website has a very handy “Quick Start” instructions on the home page, but I found that to be misleading. I recommend ignoring that going to the official installation page here.

For our guide we will be focusing on the Ubuntu installation instructions. The instructions can be found here. It is important to know that Jekyll is built using the language ruby and thus has the ability to use Ruby “Gems” with it. I won’t go into detail what a Gem is but more information can be found here.