After my fourth time of having to setting this up, I have finally decided to document the process. Here are the tools I am using to run my blog along with additional links.
Jekyll Install
In my case, I am running Windows 10, I will be following the instructions for Windows from Jekyll’s website.
To start, I will need to install Ruby. I will be using the Installerfrom Ruby’s website to get Ruby+Devkit 3.2.2-1 (x64) version with it being the latest release.
Following the documentation, we leave the ridk install option ticked and click Finish. This will open a command prompt window and ask us to press enter to continue.
After hitting finish, command prompt will run asking us to choose an option. We will choose option 3 to install MSYS2 and MINGW development toolchain.
Now we will run a new command propmt window and run the following command to install Jekyll and Bundler:
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gem install jekyll bundler
In my case, I already have a repo set up on Github with the Chirpy theme and will be cloning it locally to my machine. I used the Chirpy starter guide to get started.
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git clone myrepo
This actually failed providing me with this error: fatal: unable to access ‘https://github.com/DrDad0217/myrepo.git/’: SSL certificate problem: self-signed certificate in certificate chain
I found This article which was helpful in configuring a Windows system to use the schannel library built into Windows to handle the SSL backend for HTTP communication.
To do this, I ran the following command in VScode’s terminal:
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git config --global http.sslBackend schannel
After doing so, I was able to clone my repo with no issues.
Since I already have my gemfile configured, I am going to run a command that will start my local server and allow me to view my blog locally.
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Bundle exec jekyll serve
The output has a lot of information, but the important part is the last line which tells me that my server is running locally on port 4000.
That’s great and everything, but I want to have the site automatically refresh every time I make a change in in my editor and save it. I can apply this by adding the livereload flag to my command.
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Bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload
Here’s a big thank you from future me to now me for documenting this process. 