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Install Ruby 3 and Jekyll on Apple Silicon

darek

If you would like to start your journey with Jekyll but need the latest version of Ruby to run your gems, you will need to install Ruby in a slightly tricky way. Unfortunately, MacOS, by default, has an old and unsupported version of Ruby (2.6.6). To update it, you will need to take a few steps (a simple installation of Ruby is not sufficient).

Prerequirements

Before we start we need to install few tools

  1. Xcode - Apple IDE 
    xcode-select --install
  2. Homebrew - package manager for MacOS 
    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
  3. rbenv is a tool that helps managing multiple Ruby versions, it allows for quick switch between versions. ruby-build simplifies installation of any Ruby version. 
    brew install rbenv ruby-build

Initialize rbenv

First we need to initialize rbenv

rbenv init

And configure autorun in your shell

a. If you are using zsh

echo 'eval "$(rbenv init - zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

b. For bash users

echo 'eval "$(rbenv init - bash)"' >> ~/.bash_profile

At this moment you can verify if everything works as expected by running rbenv-doctor

curl -fsSL https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/raw/main/bin/rbenv-doctor | bash
Install Ruby

You can check what versions of Ruby are available by running

rbenv install -l

Install selected version of Ruby (3.2.2 is lates one for me)

rbenv install 3.2.2

When instalation is completed you can set version that will be used globally

rbenv global 3.2.2

To verify installation check Ruby version

ruby -v

Install Jekyll

Now when we have installed Ruby we can proceed with Jekyll installation.

Best option to install Jekyll is to do user-install and install jekyll in user directory.

gem install --user-install bundler jekyll

When installation finish you can try to use it on jekyll projects (try some from jekyll themes).

To start jekyll run command

bundle exec jekyll serve

At first You can get errors related to required gems not found, to fix that just install missing gems using command

gem install GEM_NAME

or use bundler

bundle init

Done!