Jekyll Forman Guard Bundler

This post is a quick “How did I setup my Jekyll environnement ?”. We are going all the tools that are quite awesome in Ruby.

The goal is simple :

1. I want to be able to install any dependent Gem with a on-liner command
2. I want to be able to run a Jekyll server that auto updates.

We are going to play with : Bundler, Guard and foreman.

Bundler let us run bundle install to get all Ruby Gems we will need ; It use a file name Gemfile. The gems we need are simple : jekyll, guard and some Guard extensions.

source "http://rubygems.org"

gem 'jekyll'
gem 'guard'
gem 'guard-jekyll2'
gem 'guard-shell'
gem 'guard-bundler'

Guard is a command line tool to easily handle events on file system modifications.

Guard will be watching file we told him and run action in consequence ; The file is name Guardfile.

guard 'jekyll2' do
  watch %r{.*}
end

guard :bundler do
  watch('Gemfile')
end
# vim:filetype=ruby

Finally, foreman will let us declare our processes and will handle the start, forward the output and handle the shutdown. It can then export its configuration into more production-ready file (init, upstard, …) ; It uses a file named Procfile.

We will tell foreman to run :

• The jekyll build-in server : jekyll --server
• Guard, to handle file changes in background.

web: bundle exec jekyll --server
guard: bundle exec guard

And that’s all folk. Now, you just need to run foreman in the Jekyll-powered directory and edit your files.