Setting up this website (Obselete)

April 15, 2020

Welcome to the first post of my blog. Honestly not sure what I’m planning on writing here, but for starters I figured I’d walk through the steps involved in setting this page up.

1. Finding the theme

I searched all over for some good, free jekyll themes to use for this page. I wanted something with a home page, but also the ability to host a blog on it as well. I clicked through many of the demoes and then finally came across jekyll-theme-prologue created by Chris Bobbe.

2. Setting up Ruby, Jekyll, and Bundler

Given I’m developing on a Mac, Ruby already comes installed on the latest versions of MacOS. The problem is its outdated and I’m not even sure how to update it. So I ended up following the instructions on the official Jekyll docs.

Install Ruby

# Install ruby
$ brew install ruby

# Put the newly installed ruby on your PATH
$ echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/ruby/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

# Ensure the version you installed is latest
$ ruby -v
ruby 2.7.1p83 (2020-03-31 revision a0c7c23c9c)

Install Jekyll & Bundler

# Install bundler and jekyll for the local user
$ gem install --user-install bundler jekyll

# Add the new ruby gem directory to your PATH
$ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.gem/ruby/2.7.0/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

3. Create and serve your site using Jekyll

This information can be found directly on the Jekyll docs main page here and this inforamation can be ignored if you already have a jekyll site up and running.

# Create a new site in the directory ./myblog
$ jekyll new myblog

# Enter the new directory
$ cd myblog

#Build the site to be accessed locally.
$ bundle exec jekyll serve

Your local site can now be accessed at http://localhost:4000

4. Install the theme

This step involves modifying the Gemfile in the main directory of your jekyll site. If you followed the previous step, that Gemfile can be found in the myblog/ directory.

Update the Gemfile theme
In your Gemfile you’ll see two lines that look something like this:

# This is the default theme for new Jekyll sites. You may change this to anything you like.
gem "minima", "~> 2.5.0"

You’ll want to update the name and version of the them like so:

gem "jekyll-theme-prologue", "~> 0.3.3"

Install the theme
Next you want ruby/jekyll to actually download the gem needed for your theme.

$ bundle install

Update the _config.yml file
The theme comes with a working _config.yml file located in the gems. This will likely be found at /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/gems/jekyll-theme-prologue-0.3.3. So you’ll want to navigate to that path and copy the _config.yml file to your myblog/ directory and overwrite the existing file.

5. Re-serve your site

Once you serve your site for a second time, you should now see a new theme.

$ bundle exec jekyll serve

You may need to read the documentation to get it fully functional and maybe I’ll add another post for that in the future.

For now though, enjoy!