blogging in the night

I’m listening some old German pop music (GURU GURU-Ufo). I must be mad to love this music since I’m a teenager, but it does not matter, I won’t change now that I’m 60. It’s the night, the best moment to write and play with styles on this blog. I found how to test on my computer these stylish experiments - which can fail for any reason, from syntax errors to bad design choices.

It’s as easy as

sudo gem install github-pages

In case of compilation error, look at the last lines, you’ll find the name of the faulty library, something like:

Building nokogiri using packaged libraries.
Using mini_portile version 2.3.0
checking for gzdopen() in -lz... no
zlib is missing; necessary for building libxml2
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary
libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more details.  You may
need configuration options.

Provided configuration options:
	--with-opt-dir
	--without-opt-dir
	...
  --enable-cross-build
	--disable-cross-build

To see why this extension failed to compile, please check the mkmf.log which can be found here:

  /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/extensions/x86_64-linux/2.3.0/nokogiri-1.8.2/mkmf.log

extconf failed, exit code 1

Gem files will remain installed in /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/gems/nokogiri-1.8.2 for inspection.
Results logged to /var/lib/gems/2.3.0/extensions/x86_64-linux/2.3.0/nokogiri-1.8.2/gem_make.out

The most interesting line is:

zlib is missing; necessary for building libxml2

Search a package whose name is zlib*dev. Latest Ubuntu have zlib1g-dev. Always on Ubuntu, install this missing package like that:

sudo apt install zlib1g-dev

You can restart the broken install:

sudo gem install github-pages

When everything is alright, start jekyll at the root of your project:

jekyll serve --watch

You can see your site on this URL: http://127.0.0.1:4000/. When I want to see the results of my last modification, I stop jekyll and I restart it immediately but it’s not always necessary.