Installing Jekyll on Windows 10 using WSL2

I recently setup my static site generator Jekyll on a new PC, in order to maintain this blog.
As part of this, I decided to use Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (WSL2) for my installation.

The goal of this was to simplify the Ruby setup, which is a dependency of Jekyll.
I followed the Jeykyll Windows installation instructions.

However, this did not work as expected and below is a guide to the modifications I had to do and some errors I encountered.

Versions

The following is a list of core components I am using and their versions:

- Microsoft Windows 10 Pro (10.0.19045 Build 19045)
- Ubuntu-20.04
- WSL2: 1.2.5.0 (Kernel version: 5.15.90.1)
- Jekyll: 4.3.2
- Bundler: 2.4.12

Installation

The following is a list of changes I needed to make, while following the Jekyll installation guide.

Updated WSL2: wsl --update
Had to run most commands with sudo (most likely due to my minimalist setup of wsl)
Install Ruby 2.6 (not 2.5 as per instructions)
- sudo apt-get install ruby2.6 ruby2.6-dev build-essential dh-autoreconf

Trouble Shooting

Below are some of the commands I executed, the errors I received, and the solutions to fixing them.

File System watching no longer works

If you have upgraded from WSL1 to WSL2, auto rebuilding of the site using the --watch flag no longer works.
This is a known issue as reported on github.

Solution:
The use of the --force_polling flag gets around this issue:
bundle exec jekyll serve --force_polling

Some people reported additional load on their machines when doing this, so far I’ve not noticed any bad side affects.

There are no versions of xxxxx (= x.x.x) compatible with your Ruby & RubyGems

Command: sudo gem update

ERROR:  Error installing date:
        There are no versions of date (= 3.3.3) compatible with your Ruby & RubyGems
        date requires Ruby version >= 2.6.0. The current ruby version is 2.5.0.
		  
ERROR:  Error installing etc:
        There are no versions of etc (= 1.4.2) compatible with your Ruby & RubyGems
        etc requires Ruby version >= 2.6.0. The current ruby version is 2.5.0.
		  
ERROR:  Error installing io-console:
        There are no versions of io-console (= 0.6.0) compatible with your Ruby & RubyGems
        io-console requires Ruby version >= 2.6.0. The current ruby version is 2.5.0.

ERROR:  Error installing minitest:
        There are no versions of minitest (= 5.18.0) compatible with your Ruby & RubyGems
        minitest requires Ruby version < 4.0, >= 2.6. The current ruby version is 2.5.0
		  
ERROR:  Error installing openssl:
        There are no versions of openssl (= 3.1.0) compatible with your Ruby & RubyGems
        openssl requires Ruby version >= 2.6.0. The current ruby version is 2.5.0.

Solution:
Upgrade ruby to 2.6.0

Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError

Command: gem install jekyll bundler

Fetching: public_suffix-5.0.1.gem (100%)
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
    You don't have write permissions for the /var/lib/gems/2.5.0 directory.

    ERROR:  Error installing jekyll:
    The last version of public_suffix (< 6.0, >= 2.0.2) to support your Ruby & RubyGems was 4.0.7.
    Try installing it with `gem install public_suffix -v 4.0.7` and then running the current command again
    public_suffix requires Ruby version >= 2.6. The current ruby version is 2.5.0.

    ERROR:  Error installing bundler:
    The last version of bundler (>= 0) to support your Ruby & RubyGems was 2.3.26.
    Try installing it with `gem install bundler -v 2.3.26`
    bundler requires Ruby version >= 2.6.0. The current ruby version is 2.5.0.
                 
    ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError)
    bad response Forbidden 403 (https://api.rubygems.org/quick/Marshal.4.8/google-protobuf-3.22.3-x64-unknown.gemspec.rz)

Solution:
Remove Ruby v2.5 and run through the instructions again

Error installing jekyll