Plan of Jekyll Blog - Episode 1: Jekyll-3 on Ubuntu and Nginx

This tutorial you will learn how to configure Jekyll-3 on Ubuntu 16.04 and Nginx.

Jekyll On Ubuntu

The release of the Ubuntu is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

You can follow this link Jekyll on Ubuntu to configure Jekyll.

Before we install Jekyll, we need to install Ruby and other dependencies:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential zlib1g-dev

Caution: sudo apt-get install ruby-full command on Ubuntu 16.04 even 18.04 can only install Ruby2.5, it might take some unsuspected problem.

Avoid installing RubyGems packages (called gems) as the root user. (Well, AliCloud only provides root account and I am lazy about adding a new user account. So I think it doesn’t matter to use root account.) Instead, set up a gem installation directory for your user account. The following commands will add environment variables to your ~/.bashrc file to configure the gem installation path:

echo '# Install Ruby Gems to ~/gems' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export GEM_HOME="$HOME/gems"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Finally, install Jekyll and Bundler:

gem install jekyll bundler

You can make a quick start for surfing the Jekyll blog:

jekyll new my-awesome-site
cd my-awesome-site
bundle exec jekyll serve
# => Now browse to http://localhost:4000

Or, clone the repository from GitHub and build Jekyll blog:

git clone https://github.com/IcingTomato/blog.old.git
cd blog.old
jekyll serve
# => Now browse to http://localhost:4000

Liquid warning

If you follow the step, congratulation, you cannot see any blog in your website.

Just like this:

Well, because Ruby2.5 made its Bundler incompatible with Jekyll-4.0, so we have to uninstall Jekyll-4.0 and install the previous versions.

gem uninstall jekyll
gem install jekyll -v 3.1.3

Jekyll Serve

jekyll serve will publish your site on localhost:4000. But you can change the port:

jekyll serve --port 4001

But you can’t visit it on public network. So you can:

jekyll serve -w --host=0.0.0.0

After doing these jobs, we can’t visit our website ethier.

Nginx Configuration

Because Jekyll uses port 4000, so we will make a Nginx “proxy” from port 4000 to port 80.

First, install Nginx:

sudo apt-get install nginx

Then, use your favourite text editor to edit /etc/nginx/conf.d/jekyll.conf:

root@blog:~# sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/jekyll.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name your.domain;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:4000;
    }
}

Finally, Ctrl+O and Ctrl+X to save and exit, then restart nginx.service:

sudo systemctl restart nginx
jekyll serve --detach