As you probably already know this website and blog are created using github pages which behind the scene uses Jekyll. More on this you can read on my blog post.Every time I write a new article or make a change I would like to preview it before publishing it to live website.When this get published to my website repository, Github builds it almost instantly so I'm able to see my change really fast, but this is still done on the public website. This can work pretty well but I prefer to see my changes locally and only if I'm ok to publish them on my repository. So in order to do that I need to install jekyll on my local machine and use `jekyll serve` to build and serve the website.
Install Jekyll on a Windows machine
Jekyll is build with Ruby and uses some Python libraries so we need to install them in order to run Jekyll. Since most the work I do is around Microsoft .Net platform I need to use Windows operating system . My source of inspiration was this article by David Ebbo. In his artcile he points to this article which explains all the steps in detail. The information is perfectly valid at this moment so you can follow that too but I would like to show you a simple way using Chocolatey. The steps are pretty much the same with the article, the only difference is in the way you install the applications.
What is Chocolatey ?
Chocolatey is a global PowerShell execution engine using the NuGet packaging infrastructure. Think of it as the ultimate automation tool for Windows.
It is very simple to install Chocolatey you just have to run this script on your command prompt:
{% highlight powershell %}
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin
{% endhighlight%}
If this doesn't work for you there are other ways to install chocolatey here.
Now that we have chocolatey installed we can open a command prompt and using cinst we can install what we need.
Install Ruby
Run the following command on the command prompt:
cinst ruby
To check if it was installed with success close then open a new command prompt and run:
ruby --version
Install Ruby Devkit###
Here are the steps required to install and configure Devkit:
cinst ruby2.devkit
Initialize and configure by updating config.yml file from the devkit folder. In the command prompt type the following:
cd "C:\DevKit2"
ruby dk.rb init
notepad config.yml
This will open notepad where you need to add - C:\tools\ruby200 at the end of the file. This path represents the location where ruby was installed and it might be different than the one I've specified.
After this step you need to go back to the command prompt and install gem:
ruby dk.rb review
ruby dk.rb install
At this point you should have gem installed. You can check it this way:
gem --version
If it's not working try to close and then open a new command prompt.
Install Jekyll###
Run the following command on the command prompt:
gem install jekyll
What is Pygments ?###
Pygments is a generic syntax highlighter for general use in all kinds of software such as forum systems, wikis or other applications that need to prettify source code.
Pygments is written in python so we need to install Python
Install Python
Run the following command on the command prompt:
cinst python2
Run the following command in a new command prompt to verify installation:
python --version
Install 'Easy Install'
Easy Install is a mechanism similar with ruby gems or chocolatey for python packages. In order to install it follow the steps:
1.Download ez_setup.py
2.Run the following command from the location where you saved ez_setup.py
python ez_setup.py
3.Set the 'Python Scripts' directory (e.g. C:\tools\python2\Scripts) to PATH
4.Verify that easy_install is installed properly:
easy_install --help
Install Pygments
Now that we have python and easy install all we just need to run the following commnad to install pygments:
easy_install pygments
Start Jekyll###
You can now create a new Jekyll blog which can be browsed on localhost:4000:
jekyll new myblog
cd myblog
jekyll serve
I found it much easier to install all this using Chocolatey. I'm keen to get your feedback on this.
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