davekopecek.com

My personal blog. Created Jekyll using Minimal Mistakes theme. All commands from WSL-Ubuntu shell.

First Time Setup

To perform a clean installation on WSL-Ubuntu, follow these steps to remove existing Ruby installations and start fresh. This process will install rbenv for Ruby version management, which is required for Jekyll to work properly.

# 1. Remove existing Ruby installations
sudo apt remove --purge ruby-full ruby-bundler
sudo apt autoremove
rm -rf ~/.gem
rm -rf /usr/local/lib/ruby
rm -rf /var/lib/gems
rm -rf ~/.rbenv  # Remove rbenv if present
rm -rf ~/.rvm    # Remove RVM if present (we won't be using RVM)

# 2. Clean .bashrc of Ruby-related entries
# Remove any lines containing:
# - export GEM_HOME="$HOME/gems"
# - export PATH="$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH"
# - eval "$(rbenv init -)"

# 3. Install rbenv and dependencies
sudo apt update
sudo apt install git curl libssl-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf bison build-essential libyaml-dev libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev libffi-dev libgdbm-dev

# 4. Install rbenv
curl -fsSL https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/raw/HEAD/bin/rbenv-installer | bash

# 5. Set up rbenv in .bashrc
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

# 6. Install Ruby 3.2.2 via rbenv
rbenv install 3.2.2
rbenv global 3.2.2

# 7. Install Jekyll and dependencies
gem update --system
gem install bundler
gem install jekyll

After installation, verify with:

ruby -v    # Should show Ruby 3.2.2
gem -v
bundler -v
jekyll -v

Local Development

Using WSL, run with dev config on localhost

bundle exec jekyll serve --config _config.yml,_config_dev.yml

Runs on http://127.0.0.1:4000

Note: The _config_dev.yml file contains development-specific settings that override the main config:

# Development config overrides
url: "http://127.0.0.1:4000"   # Local development URL

Local startup, include posts in _drafts folder:

# This will serve the site and make draft posts available at http://127.0.0.1:4000
# Draft posts will appear as if they were dated today
bundle exec jekyll serve --config _config.yml,_config_dev.yml --drafts

To stop all running Jekyll instances:

pkill -f jekyll

Post Workflow

Octopress provides convenient commands for creating and managing posts. Run all commands from the /site directory.

# Create a new post
bundle exec octopress new post "My New Post Title"

# Create a new draft
bundle exec octopress new draft "My Draft Post"

# Publish a draft
bundle exec octopress publish _drafts/my-draft-post.md

# Unpublish a post (convert to draft)
bundle exec octopress unpublish _posts/2023-01-01-my-post.md

Posts will be created with proper naming and frontmatter:

---
layout: post
title: "My New Post Title"
date: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS -0500
description: ""
category: articles
tags: []
image:
  feature: YYYY-MM-DD-post-title-header.jpg
---

• View @ http://127.0.0.1:4000/
• Edit post Markdown or text editor du jour
• Git add / commit / push / deploy as below

Post Images

There are several ways to include images in posts:

1. Basic Markdown syntax:

![Alt text](/images/image-name.jpg)

2. With figure and caption:

{% include figure image_path="/images/image-name.jpg" alt="Alt text" caption="Your caption here" %}

3. With alignment options:

{% include figure image_path="/images/image-name.jpg" alt="Alt text" caption="Your caption here" align="center" %}

Alignment options:

• align="left"
• align="center"
• align="right"

Images should be placed in the /site/images/ directory and referenced relative to the site root with /images/.

Post Headers

Post header images should be:

• Sized to 1900px × 500px
• Placed in the /site/images/ directory
• Named consistently (e.g., YYYY-MM-DD-post-title-header.jpg)
• Optimized for web delivery (JPEG format recommended)

Example frontmatter with header image:

---
layout: post
title: "My New Post Title"
date: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS -0500
description: ""
category: articles
tags: []
image:
  feature: YYYY-MM-DD-post-title-header.jpg
---

Quick image resize using ImageMagick:

convert source-image.jpg -resize 1900x500^ -gravity center -extent 1900x500 YYYY-MM-DD-post-title-header.jpg

Deploying

The site is automatically deployed via GitHub webhooks and Plesk when changes are pushed to the main branch. The _site directory containing the built site must be committed to the repository.

To build the site for production:

cd site
JEKYLL_ENV=production bundle exec jekyll build
git add _site
git commit -m "Update built site"
git push

Note: Always build the site with JEKYLL_ENV=production to ensure correct URLs and settings.

Documentation

• Jekyll Installation Guide
• Minimal Mistakes Theme Setup Guide