This guide is mainly an accumulation of information from two sources, both from the Jekyll Docs:

Installation:

We plan to install Jekyll1 on Ubuntu 20.04 on WSL. For this we have to install Ruby. The Ruby gems, however, we want to install only for the user (instead of a system-wide installation). For this purpose we edit the ~/.bashrc file and add the following:

# Ruby exports

export GEM_HOME=$HOME/gems
export PATH=$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH

which basically sets the path where the gems will be installed. We need to source the ~/.bashrc file now…

source ~/.bashrc

Now we start with the Ruby installation. We install this from the BrightBox PPA (Personal Package Archive):

which hosts optimized versions of Ruby for Ubuntu. (ref)

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/ruby-ng
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ruby2.5 ruby2.5-dev build-essential dh-autoreconf

Update our gems:2

gem update

and finally install Jekyll and Bundler3:

gem install jekyll bundler

And then we can check the version using jekyll -v.

New blog setup:

A blog can be quickly set up with

jekyll new sitename

which will create a folder named sitename with all the relevant files. After that, we can cd sitename and start a server at that location:

bundle exec jekyll serve --force-polling

(As of 26-Oct-2021) Without the --force-polling option, changes made to files in the site are not reflected upon reload in the website. The command itself displays this warning:

Auto-regeneration may not work on some Windows versions.
Please see: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/216
If it does not work, please upgrade Bash on Windows or run Jekyll with --no-watch.

One can also add the option --livereload to have the website reload automatically when the files are changed. Solution from issue #216 in the WSL repo.

  1. We use a fairly old version of Ruby (2.5.8p224) here, following the tutorial. It’s not necessary to do this, but various gems have to have versions whicha re consistent with each other for the whole thing to work. So this is a safe bet. ↩

  2. In my case, a few gems failed to update properly. ↩

  3. By default, this fails (version conflict between RubyGems and Ruby?).

    Fetching: public_suffix-4.0.6.gem (100%)
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (ArgumentError)
wrong number of arguments (given 4, expected 1)

    however, gem uninstall psych fixes the issue and installation completes successfully (source). TO BE INVESTIGATED. ↩