Steve Fenton

Running Jekyll on Windows

There are three parts to this quick start on running Jekyll on Windows. This assumes you pulled an existing Jekyll repo and want to run it locally. If you want to create something new, there’s a command for that, which you can run at the end of the install process before you serve the site jekyll new sitename

1. Install languages
2. Install Jekyll
3. Run the site

Install languages

To run Jekyll on Windows, you need to install the following:

• Ruby with DevKit (required)

Note that Ruby should be installed with DevKit for Ruby Gems to install. The download is an EXE that installs Ruby.

The Ruby installer should prompt you to run the following command at the end of the installation, but if not, run it manually and select option 3.

ridk install

Install Jekyll

Once you have Python and Ruby installed, you can install the Ruby Gems for Jekyll

gem install jekyll bundler webrick

If you used the wrong Ruby installer, you might not have all the dev tools and gem installation will error, so go back and check your Ruby installer was the DevTools version.

Check everything is up and running using:

jekyll -v

Run the site

The following commands should be run in the folder containing your Jekyll site.

Make sure all the packages are installed:

npm install

If you get any errors, check the message to see if you need Python (see above), or if one of your packages needs something else specific.

Then run the site using:

jekyll serve

The command will output the address of the server, which you can open in your browser:

Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000/
Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.