How to Install Jekyll Static Website Generator on Ubuntu 22.04

Jekyll is a free and open-source static file generator written in Ruby. It is a simple and easy-to-use content management system used to create a website in minutes. It takes text written in your favorite markup language and uses layouts to create a static website. You can use Jekyll's built-in features to tweak the site's look and feel, URLs, the data displayed on the page, and more. It offers a ton of features such as permalinks, categories, pages, posts, custom layouts, and many more.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jekyll CMS on Ubuntu 22.04.

Prerequisites

• A server running Ubuntu 22.04.
• A root password is configured on your server.

Getting Started

Before starting, it is recommended to update your system with the latest stable version. You can update it with the following command:

apt update -y
apt upgrade -y

Once your system is up-to-date, install other required dependencies by running the following command:

apt install make build-essential curl git tree -y

Once all the dependencies are installed, you can proceed to the next step.

Install Ruby

Jekyll is written in Ruby, so you will need to install it in your system. By default, the Ruby package is included in the Ubuntu default repository.

Run the following command to install Ruby:

apt install ruby ruby-dev -y

Once the installation is complete, you will need to tell Ruby’s gem package manager to place gems in our user’s home folder.

You can do it by editing the ~/.bashrc file:

nano ~/.bashrc

Add the following lines at the end of the file:

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

Save and close the file, then activate the environment variable with the following command:

source ~/.bashrc

Next, you can install Jekyll and bundler using the gem command as shown below:

gem install jekyll bundler

Once the installation is complete, you can proceed to the next step.

Create a New Website with Jekyll

At this point, Jekyll is installed in your system. Now, run the following command to create a new website named jekyll.example.com:

jekyll new jekyll.example.com

Once the website is created, you should get the following output:

  Bundler: Using jekyll 4.2.2
  Bundler: Fetching jekyll-seo-tag 2.8.0
  Bundler: Fetching jekyll-feed 0.16.0
  Bundler: Installing jekyll-feed 0.16.0
  Bundler: Installing jekyll-seo-tag 2.8.0
  Bundler: Fetching minima 2.5.1
  Bundler: Installing minima 2.5.1
  Bundler: Bundle complete! 7 Gemfile dependencies, 31 gems now installed.
  Bundler: Use `bundle info [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.Don't run Bundler as root. Bundler can ask for sudo if it is needed, and
  Bundler: installing your bundle as root will break this application for all non-root
  Bundler: users on this machine.
New jekyll site installed in /root/jekyll.example.com. 

Next, you list all files and directories created by Jekyll with the following command:

tree jekyll.example.com

You should get the following output:

jekyll.example.com
??? 404.html
??? about.markdown
??? _config.yml
??? Gemfile
??? Gemfile.lock
??? index.markdown
??? _posts
    ??? 2022-09-25-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown

1 directory, 7 files

Start Jekyll Server

First, navigate to the website directory and add the webrick dependency using the following command:

cd jekyll.example.com
bundle add webrick

Next, start the Jekyll web server by running the following command:

jekyll serve --host=0.0.0.0

Once the server starts successfully, you should get the following output:

Configuration file: /root/jekyll.example.com/_config.yml
            Source: /root/jekyll.example.com
       Destination: /root/jekyll.example.com/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating... 
       Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
                    done in 0.375 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/root/jekyll.example.com'
    Server address: http://0.0.0.0:4000/
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

Access the Jekyll Website

At this point, Jekyll is started and listening on port 4000. Now, open your web browser and type the URL http://your-server-ip:4000. You will be redirected to the Jekyll default page:

Conclusion

In the above guide, you learned how to install Jekyll on Ubuntu 22.04. You can now explore Jekyll and create your own website using the automatically-generated content.