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installing Jekyll

Personal experience

Tested in Kubuntu 17.10.

Jekyll requires Ruby, RubyGems, GCC, and Make. In Ubuntu, install the Ruby Version Manager, then open Gnome Terminal with gnome-terminal. Use rvm list to check if Ruby version 2.1 or greater is installed, and if not use rvm install ruby. Verify RubyGems is installed with gem -v, GCC is installed with gcc -v, and Make is installed with make -v.

At this point the official documentation says to use gem install jekyll, but this fails with:

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
    You don't have write permissions for the /var/lib/gems/2.3.0 directory.

The solution seems to be changing the version of Ruby to 2.3.0, matching the version used by RubyGems. Verify this by running gem env and which ruby to see if they match. The RUBY EXECUTABLE directory should match the directory shown with which ruby. If not, install Ruby 2.3.0 using rvm install ruby-2.3.0 and set it as the version used by Ruby Version Manager using rvm use ruby-2.3.0. Using gem install jekyll should now work correctly. Also use gem install bundler as this is apparently also required despite not being listed among Jekyll's installation requirements. Some Jekyll themes may also require sudo apt install cmake.

licensing

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prior work