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Jekyll on Windows

While Windows is not an officially-supported platform, it can be used to run Jekyll with the proper tweaks. This page aims to collect some of the general knowledge and lessons that have been unearthed by Windows users.

Installation

Julian Thilo has written up instructions to get Jekyll running on Windows and it seems to work for most. The instructions were written for Ruby 2.0.0, but should work for later versions prior to 2.2.

Alternatively David Burela has written instructions on how to install Jekyll via Chocolately with 3 command prompt entries

Encoding

If you use UTF-8 encoding, make sure that no BOM header characters exist in your files or very, very bad things will happen to Jekyll. This is especially relevant if you’re running Jekyll on Windows.

Additionally, you might need to change the code page of the console window to UTF-8 in case you get a “Liquid Exception: Incompatible character encoding” error during the site generation process. It can be done with the following command:

$ chcp 65001

Auto-regeneration

As of v1.3.0, Jekyll uses the listen gem to watch for changes when the --watch switch is specified during a build or serve. While listen has built-in support for UNIX systems, it requires an extra gem for compatibility with Windows. Add the following to the Gemfile for your site:

gem 'wdm', '~> 0.1.0' if Gem.win_platform?