In the Jekyll garden

Continuing my research on a static website workflow, I’m spinning up a new personal website as an excuse to try building a new Jekyll-based static website. Doing so reveals the rough edges.

How so?

I’m trying a new Jekyll theme, Basically Basic, made by the same developer, Michael Rose, for the Minimal Mistakes theme that I use for my professional website. He’s done excellent work supporting and maintaining with his Minimal Mistakes theme, so I’m comfortable with his new theme as a starting point.

I’m on a Windows 10 21H1, using WSL2 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. In that virtualized OS I am using rbenv to manage my Ruby versions. Already, expecting a non-information technologist to build or configure such an environment is a concern. I suppose a docker image may help? Digression: writing this motivated me to upgrade Ubuntu to 20.04. Thanks to this careful description of the process, I did so without interrupting my post-upgrade environment, which is no small engineering feet.

Noted I used this method to copy the 18.04 image export to my OneDrive as a remote backup. It enabled a PowerShell progress bar on the copy transfer process.

With those details out of the way, my first step was to cd to my desired disk location and create a new Jekyll website

jekyll new recipes

If you’ve been through my website, that premise shouldn’t surprise you. I then cd recipes to snap in the Basically Basic theme, using the Ruby Gem Method to install the theme and gem requirements.

Great! Ready to go, right? Not so fast. Welcome to Ruby. My first attempt at a server run is met with failure. The ffi gem is incompatible with… something. I don’t know whether Ruby 3.0.0 or Jekyll 4.2. To fix this failure I must backport ffi to version 1.14.2.

I run bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload and I’m met with this error.

/home/figgles/gems/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/commands/serve/servlet.rb:3:in 'require': cannot load such file -- webrick (LoadError)

This is a known Ruby 3.0.0 bug. I fixed it with this:

bundle add webrick

Whoops! I run bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload and I’m met with a ffi library error. However, I cannot replicate the error after updating my OS. If you do experience this, you can run the following:
Update the Gemlock.file to ffi (1.14.2)
bundle remove ffi
bundle add ffi --version=1.14.2

Finally, I can successfully launch my local compiled website and begin making edits. Since I am an information technologist, that’s fine. These convolutions, however, make recommending this approach more problematic, especially for non-IT users, such as researchers or faculty.