How this site was born

I have a friend who wants to build a personal blog site and learn something about web development along the way. A static site would definitely suit his needs, so it was a great opportunity to try GitHub Pages and Jekyll.

I followed the GitHub Pages documentation, to set up this site. It mostly worked as expected, but I did experience a few errors along the way.

Troubleshooting

  1. When installing Jekyll via gem install jekyll, I got the following error:
    current directory: /Users/bencoomes/.rvm/gems/ruby-3.0.2/gems/eventmachine-1.2.7/ext
    make DESTDIR\=
    compiling binder.cpp
    In file included from binder.cpp:20:
    ./project.h:116:10: fatal error: 'openssl/ssl.h' file not found
    #include <openssl/ssl.h>
    

    This Stackoverflow post contains the solution:

    brew link --force opensll
    

    then

    gem install eventmachine -- --with-cppflags=-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include
    

    After running those commands, I was able to run gem install jekyll successfully.

  2. When trying to host my site locally via bundle exec jekyll server, I got this error:
    /Users/bencoomes/.rvm/gems/ruby-3.1.2/gems/jekyll-3.9.2/lib/jekyll/commands/serve/servlet.rb:3:in `require': cannot load such file -- webrick (LoadError)
    

    The solution is to include webrick in the Gemfile because webrick isn’t included in Ruby 3.0 and later.