Setting up my blogging environment

I use jekyll with minimal mistakes for publishing the blog. Here are the steps to setup a local server to write new pages in the existing framework.

In this case I am starting off with a fresh install of Ubuntu17.04 in a virtual machine. It came with ruby installed so, gem command was already available, but ruby-dev had to be installed along with couple of other tools.

sudo apt-get install build-essential patch ruby-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev jekyll bundler

Once the tools are installed, got to the cloned blog folder and run the following command to install missing gems and dependencies.

bundle config build.nokogiri --use-system-libraries     --with-xml2-lib=/usr/lib     --with-xml2-include=/usr/include/libxml2     --with-xslt-lib=/usr/lib     --with-xslt-include=/usr/include
bundle install

nokogiri setup is required for latest version to compile with system versions of xml libs.

Once all installations are successful, run the following command to serve the blog in localhost

bundle exec jekyll serve

Use the --incremental flag when writing pages since the process will be faster