How to install Jekyll on Windows 10 example

Jekyll install on Windows tutorial

Ruby and Windows aren’t exactly two peas in a pod, but if the need to test your Jekyll based blog software on a Windows 10 machine, you need to make that marriage work. In this tutorial, we’ll provide you with a quick and simple example of how to install Jekyll on Windows 10.

Steps to install Jekyll on Windows 10

Here are the quick steps to install Jekyll on Windows

1. Download and install Ruby and the associated Devkit from rubyinstaller.org
2. Keep all options selected during the Ruby install
3. Click the checkbox to run ridk install on the final screen of the Ruby install
4. In the command window that appears, choose option 3 to install MSYS2 and the MINGW development toolchain
5. Open an new command window and install Jekyll on Windows with the following command:
   1. gem install jekyll bundler
6. Verify the install by issuing the jekyll -v command
7. Create a new blog with the jekyll new myblog command
8. From the myblog folder created in the previous step issue the following command
   1. cd myblog
   2. bundle exec jekyll serve
9. Open a browser to http://localhost:4000 and view your Jekyll blog on Windows

Local Jekyll blog development on Windows

These steps will not only install Jekyll on Windows 10, but it will also create an empty Jekyll blog and run it on your local machine.

Ensure the option to run ‘ridk install’ is selected when you install Jekyll on Windows 10.

GitHub Pages and Jekyll Blogs

It’s worth noting that if you are a GitHub user and your Jekyll blog is hosted on GitHub Pages, you don’t need to develop your business or personal website locally. You can do all of your editing online with a GitHub repository’s web UI interface. Any changes you make directly to your GitHub Pages files will be compiled and integrated into the site almost immediately, with the word ‘almost’ being critical.

Jekyll tends to be slow to compile, so it sometimes takes five minutes after a change to see it reflected on your live site. If you can live with that type of delay, then you may have no need to locally install Jekyll on Windows 10.

But if you want to use your own text editor and take advantage of fast compile times, having Jekyll installed locally on your Windows or Linux machine is definitely the way to go.