Building my Jekyll blog with Ubuntu on WSL2

#wsl #wsl2 #ruby #jekyll

The steps weren’t entirely obvious to me so I thought I’d write about it here for others who are newer to that ecosystem.

Windows 10 v2004 is available, and with it comes the addition of long-awaited toolset – WSL2, the successor to the original Windows Subsystem for Linux. WSL2 is great – much faster, and it uses an actual Linux kernel, making it 100% Linux compatible.

High-level view

Here’s what I did.

Installed the Win10 May 2019 (v2004) update
Installed WSL2 (essentially following the prompts along the way)
Installed Ubuntu 20.04 from the store, which installed it using WSL2.

(If you’d like help on any of the above, leave a message in the comments and I’ll expand on this blog post.)

Then, I went back and forth on dependencies and installation stuff, but it wasn’t that bad.

The shortcut, if you don’t want to do all of that back and forth

Update package list: sudo apt update
For Ruby: sudo apt-get install ruby-full
For Bundler: sudo gem install bundler
Install dev dependencies that my gems need: sudo apt-get install make gcc gpp build-essential zlib1g zlib1g-dev
Run bundle install which prompts for my password when things need elevation
now it works.
Run bundle exec jekyll serve
Watch it build and run in Linux and watch my blog be available in Windows.

The (more painful) long steps

I re-did this again the hard way, for you dear reader! I’ll try to capture what I learned along the way.

Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from the windows store. Start it up set a PW, etc.
mkdir repos to create a directory for my repositories
cd repos
Pulled my repo: git clone https://github.com/SeanKilleen/seankilleen.github.io.git
Update package list: sudo apt update
Install ruby: sudo apt-get install ruby
Bundler: sudo gem install bundler
Open my repo: cd seankilleen.github.io
bundle install
See an error: Gem::Ext::BuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. Also: An error occurred while installing commonmarker (0.17.13), and Bundler cannot continue.
Do some googling, see that I might need more of ruby
sudo apt-get install ruby-full
Try again: bundle install. See error: make not found
sudo apt-get install make
Try again: bundle install. Get error: make: gcc: Command not found
sudo apt-get install gcc
Try again: bundle install. We get further! Commonmark is now installed. but we see another error: make: g++: Command not found
sudo apt-get install gpp (got lucky here and assumed ++ translated to pp)
Try again: bundle install. Same error. Weird.
Google. Find an answer that suggests using build-essential instead. Seems reasonable. (I think I also could have actually done sudo apt-get install g++ as well. So much for my translation!)
sudo apt-get install build-essential
Try again: bundle install. We get farther! eventmachine is now installed.
nokogiri installation fails. See error: zlib is missing; necessary for building libxml2
sudo apt-get install zlib. Not found.
Google. Find some help. Apparently it’s zlib1g.
sudo apt-get install zlib1g. Weird. It’s already installed?
The error is a build error, so let’s try sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev.
Try again: bundle install. INSTALLATION SUCCEEDS!
bundle exec jekyll serve
Things are built an served on localhost:4000. Looks good!