Installing Jekyll on a Mac in March 2024

a min to read page

Why

  • I wanted to run Jekyll on my Mac to see changes locally.

Process

  • Follow the quickstart guide on official Jekyll website

  • Problem 1: gem install jekyll received no output.

  • Solution: terminal helpfully warned that.

You don’t have /Users/username/.gem/ruby/2.6.0/bin in your PATH, gem executables will not run.

  • Problem 2: find the PATH

  • Solution: (a) echo @$PATH``, (b) edit .bash_profile```

  • Problem 3: still no Jekyll

  • Use the which command to find out why Jekyll isn’t recognised

  • Use this 10 year old answer $ gem install -n /usr/local/bin jekyll

  • Problem 4: nuked .bash_profile somewhere in the process, so that couldn’t even ls or cd anywhere

  • Solution: used this fix, i.e. temporarily assign an echo path to revive ls and cd, and then fix the .bash_profile file, where my mindless additions overwrote pre-existing paths!

Reflections

  • Budget in the time with tinkering, and enjoying the classic early computer experience.

  • Environment variables is something I should learn about, as it surfaces time and again as I went about fixing issues.

Unresolved

Running ~/.bash_profile in bash in VS Code Terminal and Terminal yields different results.