Creating a development environment with conda

Using conda to build a jekyll site

Start by setting a conda environment that includes ruby I used this website as a guide but as usual, it did not work as is…

The commands I made were:

conda create --prefix ./_conda
conda activate _conda
conda install -c conda-forge c-compiler compilers cxx-compiler
conda install -c conda-forge ruby

I do not get into details about conda but the _conda folder weight too much and I add it to the .gitignore. Additionally, I want to keep this environment for future needs so I want to keep an environment.yaml to obtain the same environment whenever is needed.

conda env export > environment.yaml

This way, if needed, I can recreate the environment with and update the environment if there are some updated dependencies with the commands:

conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda env update --file environment.yaml --prune

Okay, now we have jekyll installed, a Gemfile to track dependencies and bundle to orchestrate those.

Now from the jekyll documentation, we can run:

gem install bundler
bundle init
bundle install
bundle add jekyll
bundle config set --local path '_bundle'
bundle exec jekyll --version

This creates a jekyll scaffold with about.markdown, index.markdown, 404.html and _posts folder.

bundle exec jekyll new --force --skip-bundle .
bundle exec jekyll serve

This creates a jekyll scaffold with about.markdown, index.markdown, 404.html and _posts folder and then it serves the website locally with bundle exec jekyll serve. You can visit it at http://127.0.0.1:4000.

From here, you’re ready to continue developing the site on your own. All of the normal Jekyll commands are available to you, but you should prefix them with bundle exec so that Bundler runs the version of Jekyll that is installed in your project folder.