First Post – Setting Up GitHub Pages

I’ve finally come around to getting this going with motivation from CJ. It’s pretty cool how smoothly the setup process can be (though there’s always a few hiccups as with anything). Nowadays much of the back-end stuff is taken care of as a black-box. Even though I didn’t have others help, I wouldn’t consider this “building” my own website. This blog post is just a markdown file that will get converted to HTML by kramdown/Jekyll. Not going into any details here, as others have already said enough.

I found this theme through a quick google search and stuck with it for the minimalist design.

Here’s the catch… earlier this year, I had tried to get GitHub Pages running with the built-in version of ruby on macOS. Bad idea. I must have ran sudo gem install jekyll bundle so running jekyll serve works fine on my machine, but gem install was not behaving correctly without root permissions.

Detecting that I had the wrong ruby version:

$ which ruby
/usr/bin/ruby
$ ruby -v
ruby 2.0.0p648 (2015-12-16 revision 53162) [universal.x86_64-darwin15]

GitHub Pages requires ruby >=2.1.0. Attempting to install via Homebrew following this guide:

$ brew install gnupg
$ gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3 7D2BAF1CF37B13E2069D6956105BD0E739499BDB
gpg: directory '/Users/Victor/.gnupg' created
gpg: keybox '/Users/Victor/.gnupg/pubring.kbx' created
gpg: keyserver receive failed: No route to host

This error is easily fixed by following the direction on RVM install page.

$ gpg --keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3 7D2BAF1CF37B13E2069D6956105BD0E739499BDB

Install RVM:

$ curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby
$ source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
$ which rvm
/Users/Victor/.rvm/bin/rvm

Looks like the correct ruby is installed and being used. Also be sure to add that final source command to your respective .bash_profile. Check ruby version:

$ ruby -v
ruby 2.4.1p111 (2017-03-22 revision 58053) [x86_64-darwin15]

Looks good! Install necessary gems:

$ gem install jekyll bundler

Add a Gemfile to install required gems for the blog:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'github-pages'
gem 'jekyll-paginate'

Finish the install using bundle install. Run jekyll serve to preview and navigate the entire site on a local machine. git commit, git push, and we’re here!