The best way to install Jekyll is via RubyGems:

gem install jekyll

Jekyll requires the gems directory_watcher, liquid, maruku and classifier. These are automatically installed by the gem install command.

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 Debian systems by:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-dev

or on Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora systems by:

sudo yum install ruby-devel

On NearlyFreeSpeech you need:

RB_USER_INSTALL=true gem install jekyll

If you encounter errors like Failed to build gem native extension on Windows you may need to install RubyInstaller DevKit.

On OSX, you may need to update RubyGems:

sudo gem update --system

You may also need to install Command Line Tools for Xcode if you see errors like missing headers. Download from here.

Maruku comes with optional support for LaTeX to PNG rendering via blahtex (Version 0.6) which must be in your $PATH along with dvips.

(NOTE: remi’s fork of Maruku does not assume a fixed location for dvips if you need that fixed)

If you prefer to use RDiscount instead of Maruku for markdown, just make sure it’s installed:

sudo gem install rdiscount

And run Jekyll with the following option:

jekyll --rdiscount

Or, in your _config.yml file put the following so you don’t have to specify the flag:

markdown: rdiscount

If you want syntax highlighting via the {% highlight %} tag in your posts, you’ll need to install Pygments.

It already comes preinstalled with Python 2.6

sudo easy_install Pygments

Alternatively on OS X with MacPorts:

sudo port install python25 py25-pygments

Alternatively on OS X with Homebrew:

brew install python
# export PATH="/usr/local/share/python:${PATH}"
easy_install pip
pip install --upgrade distribute
pip install pygments

Note: Homebrew doesn’t symlink the executables for you. For the Homebrew default Cellar location and Python 2.7, be sure to add /usr/local/share/python to your PATH. For, more information, check out this.

sudo pacman -S python-pygments

Or to use python2 for pygments:

sudo pacman -S python2-pygments

Note: python2 pygments version creates a pygmentize2 executable, while jekyll tries to find pygmentize. Either create a symlink # ln -s /usr/bin/pygmentize2 /usr/bin/pygmentize or use the python3 version. (This advice seems to be outdated — python2-pygments does install pygmentize).

sudo apt-get install python-pygments

sudo yum install python-pygments

sudo emerge -av dev-python/pygments