In Part 1 I said that blogging with GitHub Pages and Jekyll is a popular choice but it could be much simpler.

GitHub Pages instructions, disappointingly, left us with an index.html file simply containing the text Hello, World. As an advanced option that would be great, but but I’d hoped for a markdown-based blog site out of the box.

Jekyll’s Prerequisites

As it turns out Jekyll’s Quickstart Guide assumes you have a ruby development environment already.

See my Ruby development environment quickstart guide to fulfil that requirement for macOS.

Jekyll’s installation documentation is otherwise helpful for various platforms.

Installing Jekyll

As Jekyll’s installation documentation suggests we install both bundler to manage plugins and themes along with jekyll itself.

gem install bundler jekyll

In part 3, we’ll use look at theming jekyll.

You can also now refer again to Jekyll’s quickstart guide, it’s basic usage and various docs.