How I Built a Simple Static Jekyll Site Without Installing Ruby: A Rant

Sometimes I have to make a static website.

It’s 2019. There are great tools to help build static websites. They let you write the content in Markdown and style with SCSS.

I want to try Jekyll. It looks cool.

I read the install instructions.

The first step says:

Install a full Ruby development environment

No

No no no no no no no

Nooooooo

Why?

Ruby is fine. If you like Ruby, that’s great! But I don’t want a new language dev environment. I don’t want to install Ruby on every machine I own. I don’t want to keep Ruby up to date. I don’t want to install rvm when I inevitably have a version conflict.

When you get furniture from Ikea, do the instructions say:

“Step 1: Install a drill press on your table and subscribe to Drill Press Monthly Magazine”

I like drill presses too but I don’t want one on my table.

How I Create the Site

But I am fine installing Ruby if it’s isolated in a container.

Can I build this static site in a container? This seems like a fun challenge.

First I need to create a Ruby container with a shell.

$ docker pull ruby
$ docker run --name my-jekyll-env -it ruby sh

That opens a terminal in the container.

# gem install jekyll bundler
...
# jekyll new src
Running bundle install in /src...
...
New jekyll site installed in /src.

Now I’ve got a container with the auto-generated new site.

I can exit out of the container and copy the source code out like this:

# exit
$ docker cp my-jekyll-env:/src .
$ docker rm my-jekyll-env

Success!

$ ls src
404.html  about.md  _config.yml  Gemfile  Gemfile.lock  index.md  _posts  _site

Now I have the beginnings of a Jekyll site without installing Ruby.

How I Make Changes to the Site

I have a separate container for running the Jekyll server. Docker mounts are a good way to share these source files with the container.

Here’s what the Dockerfile looks like:

FROM ruby:2.6
RUN gem install jekyll bundler
WORKDIR /src
ENTRYPOINT bundle update && bundle exec jekyll serve \
  --host 0.0.0.0 --config _config.yml

It starts with the Ruby environment above. The container runs the jekyll serve command that automatically picks up any changes to source files.

Then I run it with:

docker build -t my-jekyll-env -f Dockerfile .
docker run --name my-jekyll-env \
  --mount type=bind,source=$(pwd)/src,target=/src \
  -p 4000:4000 \
  -it \
   my-jekyll-env

The --mount flag shares my local files with the container.

The -p flag automatically forwards port 4000 outside the container to port 4000 inside the container.

The -it flag connects my terminal to the server, so that I can use Ctrl-C to quit.

And that’s it! I have a full Jekyll environment without installing Ruby.

Disclosure

I work on Tilt. Tilt is a development environment for building services in containers. The site I built is https://tilt.dev/. It’s hosted on Netlify (yay Netlify!) and is only a little bit more complicated than the starter site described above.

You’re probably saying “Oh! He’s a hype man for containers. He’s trying to sell me something.”

But you have the causality reversed! The reason I work on Tilt is because reproducible dev environments are a problem worth solving, and containers seem like a plausible way to solve them.

I don’t care if you use Docker Compose or Bazel or Buck something else. It’s about getting to a local dev environment that’s on any computer, wherever you are.

The machinery can be overwrought and fussy. You need an opinionated way to:

• Create the environment (where? in a VM? in an OS sandbox?)

• Put input files inside (how? rsync? symlinks? mounts?)

• Get artifacts out

• Keep the environment alive when you’re using it and put it to sleep when you’re not

The Bazel team has thought about this more than anyone I know. But I want to see more tools in this space!

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Originally posted on the Windmill Engineering blog on Medium