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Troubleshooting

If you ever run into problems installing or using Jekyll, here are a few tips that might be of help. If the problem you’re experiencing isn’t covered below, please report an issue so the Jekyll community can make everyone’s experience better.

Installation Problems

If you encounter errors during gem installation, you may need to install the header files for compiling extension modules for ruby 1.9.1. This can be done on Ubuntu or Debian by running:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-dev

On Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora systems you can do this by running:

sudo yum install ruby-devel

On NearlyFreeSpeech you need to run the following commands before installing Jekyll:

export GEM_HOME=/home/private/gems
export GEM_PATH=/home/private/gems:/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/
export PATH=$PATH:/home/private/gems/bin
export RB_USER_INSTALL='true'

On OSX, you may need to update RubyGems:

sudo gem update --system

If you still have issues, you may need to use XCode to install Command Line Tools that will allow you to install native gems using the following command:

sudo gem install jekyll

To install RubyGems on Gentoo:

sudo emerge -av dev-ruby/rubygems

On Windows, you may need to install RubyInstaller DevKit.

Could not find a JavaScript runtime. (ExecJS::RuntimeUnavailable)

This error can occur during the installation of jekyll-coffeescript when you don’t have a proper JavaScript runtime. To solve this, either install execjs and therubyracer gems, or install nodejs. Check out issue #2327 for more info.

Problems running Jekyll

On Debian or Ubuntu, you may need to add /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/ to your path in order to have the jekyll executable be available in your Terminal.

Base-URL Problems

If you are using base-url option like:

jekyll serve --baseurl '/blog'

… then make sure that you access the site at:

http://localhost:4000/blog/index.html

It won’t work to just access:

http://localhost:4000/blog

Configuration problems

The order of precedence for conflicting configuration settings is as follows:

  1. Command-line flags
  2. Configuration file settings
  3. Defaults

That is: defaults are overridden by options specified in _config.yml, and flags specified at the command-line will override all other settings specified elsewhere.

Markup Problems

The various markup engines that Jekyll uses may have some issues. This page will document them to help others who may run into the same problems.

Maruku

If your link has characters that need to be escaped, you need to use this syntax:

![Alt text](http://yuml.me/diagram/class/[Project]->[Task])

If you have an empty tag, i.e. <script src="js.js"></script>, Maruku transforms this into <script src="js.js" />. This causes problems in Firefox and possibly other browsers and is discouraged in XHTML. An easy fix is to put a space between the opening and closing tags.

Liquid

The latest version, version 2.0, seems to break the use of {{ in templates. Unlike previous versions, using {{ in 2.0 triggers the following error:

'{{' was not properly terminated with regexp: /\}\}/  (Liquid::SyntaxError)

Excerpts

Since v1.0.0, Jekyll has had automatically-generated post excerpts. Since v1.1.0, Jekyll also passes these excerpts through Liquid, which can cause strange errors where references don’t exist or a tag hasn’t been closed. If you run into these errors, try setting excerpt_separator: "" in your _config.yml, or set it to some nonsense string.

Please report issues you encounter!

If you come across a bug, please create an issue on GitHub describing the problem and any work-arounds you find so we can document it here for others.