Written by Swetha Tanamala
on 

Jekyll github blogs and their ruby dependencies

As an avid python programmer I know nothing about the ruby programming language. I took help of my friend to create this blog. Everytime I change my laptop I have to install existing dependencies to run my current blog. I frequently forget the things on how to install dependencies effeciently to update my blog and check how my blog looks before it goes to public. This time I thought to write my research on how exactly this blog is built and the dependences to run this blog.

Ruby and Python

These both languages are opensource and are object-oriented programming languages. Both are scripting, server-side, cross-platform and general purpose programming languages. Both are dynamically typed, which means you do not need to declare the type of variable before using it.

Python Ruby
Due to python’s straightforward and simple syntax, most freshers opt for it. For a beginner, Ruby can be slightly challenging, as the language usually takes much getting used to
As for Python, you’ll find a plethora of ready-to-use code or “modules” that are easily accessible via PyPI
Although Ruby, too, has same number of ready-to-use code called Gems, the difference between Ruby and Python reusable code lies in the filtering factor
Python’s virtualenv lets developers isolate different versions of the python interpreter Ruby also comes with similar features -rbenv or rvm
Python is used for websites such as Google, YouTube, Spotify, and Quora. Ruby is used widely for websites such as Airbnb, Hulu, Kickstarter, twitter, basecamp and Github

The above comparision is taken from this source

My Blog - Tale theme

My blog uses tale theme which inturn uses jekyll gem. If you are interested to start a blog of your own, you can directly clone this repository from github and add text in markdown (.md) files under _posts folder. To develop your blogs locally, check below

What is jekyll?

Jekyll helps to transform plain text into static websites and blogs. The Jekyll gem makes a jekyll executable available to you in the terminal. The usage of the jekyll command is given here. I use the following command to update the blog or test the changes in my blog.

jekyll serve

But before the above command, there are dependencies to run the above successfully. To install jekyll gem we need to install ruby

For linux

sudo apt-get install ruby-full

For Macos

brew install ruby

The ruby version can be checked using the followig

ruby -v

For me it resulted

ruby 2.7.0p0 (2019-12-25 revision 647ee6f091) [x86_64-linux-gnu]

with ruby, gems will also be installed and gem version can be checked using

gem -v

It was 3.1.4 version, I had to downgrade it using below command due to (Gem::UnsatisfiableDependencyError)

sudo gem update --system <version no>

I used 2.5.2 version no. Then you can install jekyll gem by the following command

gem install bundler jekyll

You might have got a question what is bundler doing here

What is bundler?

Bundler provides a consistent environment for ruby projects by tracking and installing the exact gems and versions that are needed. Now go to the directory of ruby project, here it is my blog directory. To install the dependency gems use the following command

bundle install

Lets explore the ruby repository structure

When you clone tale, the following files are important to know

Final step

Run the below command to run the jekyll website locally

bundle exec jekyll serve

Check the result of the above command

result of jekyll serve command

Once you are satisfied with the content, push the .md file and its dependencies like images, etc., to the master branch. Make sure your github repository name is username.github.io where “username” is your actual Github user name. Using github pages, the site is automatically built and can access your blog site using your repository name as link.