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Installation

Getting Jekyll installed and ready-to-go should only take a few minutes. If it ever becomes a pain in the ass, 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 is easy and straight-forward, but there are a few requirements you’ll need to make sure your system has before you start.

Ruby (including development headers, v1.9.3 or above for Jekyll 2 and v2 or above for Jekyll 3)
RubyGems
Linux, Unix, or Mac OS X
NodeJS, or another JavaScript runtime (Jekyll 2 and earlier, for CoffeeScript support).
Python 2.7 (for Jekyll 2 and earlier)

Running Jekyll on Windows

While Windows is not officially supported, it is possible to get it 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. If you have problems installing Jekyll, check out the troubleshooting page or report an issue so the Jekyll community can improve the experience for everyone.

Installing Xcode Command-Line Tools

If you run into issues installing Jekyll's dependencies which make use of native extensions and are using Mac OS X, you will need to install Xcode and the Command-Line Tools it ships with. Download 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.

Now that you’ve got everything installed, let’s get to work!

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