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Installation

Getting Jekyll installed and ready-to-go should only take a few minutes. If it ever becomes a pain, please file an issue (or submit a pull request) describing the issue you encountered and how we might make the process easier.

Requirements

Installing Jekyll should be straight-forward if all requirements are met. Before you start, make sure your system has the following:

  • GNU/Linux, Unix, or macOS
  • Ruby version 2.1 or above, including all development headers
  • RubyGems
  • GCC and Make (in case your system doesn’t have them installed, which you can check by running gcc -v and make -v in your system’s command line interface)

Only required for Jekyll 2 and earlier

Problems installing Jekyll?

Check out the troubleshooting page or report an issue so the Jekyll community can improve the experience for everyone.

Running Jekyll on Windows

While Windows is not officially supported, it is possible to get Jekyll running on Windows. Special instructions can be found on our Windows-specific docs page.

Install with RubyGems

The best way to install Jekyll is via RubyGems. At the terminal prompt, simply run the following command to install Jekyll:

$ gem install jekyll

All of Jekyll’s gem dependencies are automatically installed by the above command, so you won’t have to worry about them at all.

Installing Xcode Command-Line Tools

If you run into issues installing Jekyll's dependencies which make use of native extensions and are using macOS, you will need to install Xcode and the Command-Line Tools it ships with. Download them in Preferences → Downloads → Components.

Pre-releases

In order to install a pre-release, make sure you have all the requirements installed properly and run:

gem install jekyll --pre

This will install the latest pre-release. If you want a particular pre-release, use the -v switch to indicate the version you’d like to install:

gem install jekyll -v '2.0.0.alpha.1'

If you’d like to install a development version of Jekyll, the process is a bit more involved. This gives you the advantage of having the latest and greatest, but may be unstable.

$ git clone git://github.com/jekyll/jekyll.git
$ cd jekyll
$ script/bootstrap
$ bundle exec rake build
$ ls pkg/*.gem | head -n 1 | xargs gem install -l

Optional Extras

There are a number of (optional) extra features that Jekyll supports that you may want to install, depending on how you plan to use Jekyll. These extras include LaTeX support, and the use of alternative content rendering engines. Check out the extras page for more information.

ProTip™: Enable Syntax Highlighting

If you’re the kind of person who is using Jekyll, then chances are you’ll want to enable syntax highlighting using Pygments or Rouge. You should really check out how to do that before you go any farther.

Already Have Jekyll?

Before you start developing with Jekyll, you may want to check that you’re up to date with the latest version. To find your version of Jekyll, run one of these commands:

$ jekyll --version
$ gem list jekyll

You can also use RubyGems to find the current versioning of any gem. But you can also use the gem command line tool:

$ gem search jekyll --remote

and you’ll search for just the name jekyll, and in brackets will be latest version. Another way to check if you have the latest version is to run the command gem outdated. This will provide a list of all the gems on your system that need to be updated. If you aren’t running the latest version, run this command:

$ gem update jekyll

Now that you’ve got everything up-to-date and installed, let’s get to work!