Serving a Jekyll-based GitHub Blog from Ubuntu

This post explains how to preview a blog on Ubuntu — either locally or from another machine on the same network.

[01] Setting Up Jekyll on Ubuntu

A service for registering websites with Google’s search engine so they can be discovered, and for monitoring search results. It works through web crawling.

• Install Ruby and the related packages.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential zlib1g-dev

• Configure GEM so you don’t have to run it with sudo — i.e., for convenience.

  GEM is Ruby’s library manager. Think of it as apt-get specialized for Ruby.

• The configuration below should be done as a non-root user.

  echo '# Install Ruby Gems to ~/gems' >> ~/.bashrc
  echo 'export GEM_HOME="$HOME/gems"' >> ~/.bashrc
  echo 'export PATH="$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
  source ~/.bashrc
  

• Install Jekyll and Bundler.

  gem isntall jekyll bundler
  

[02] Building or Downloading the GitBlog Site

• Clone an existing GitBlog site (git clone) and install the required packages.

# example
cd gitblog
bundle install

• Run the GitBlog service.

  ''' Run locally '''
  jekyll serve
  ''' Run bound to the server IP so external clients can connect '''
  jekyll serve --host=${Server IP address}