Setting up Jekyll on a new computer

Migrating to a new computer or starting from a fresh install is always a bit of a chore. You have to get all your software and development environment set up. It’s a huge amount of friction to getting started on projects again. I wanted to write this short blog post to get me started and motivated to do some spare time projects.

Process

1. I cloned the repo for this blog from GitHub
2. I ran gem install jekyll bundler to install bundler and jekyll as I didn’t have them installed
   • Ruby was automatically installed alongside xcode-tools when I was first setting up the laptop
3. I used bundle install --path vendor/bundle to install gems for the project separately to have the dependencies in an isolated environment instead of globally
4. After that it was all good to go with bundle exec jekyll serve
5. Time to upload this post