Jekyll takes a bit of effort to set up on Win7. I was hoping to just grab Ruby and gems on Cygwin to install it but that didn’t work out as planned. So here is how I made Jekyll work on Win7 64-bit.

Installing Ruby

Grab Ruby Installer from their downloads page. I used Ruby 1.9.3-p0. The install should go by smoothly.

Installing dev-kit

From the same downloads page above, download the development kit. I used DevKit-tdm-32-4.5.2-20110712-1620-sfx

This is just a 7z file so extract it to a folder (%DEVKITFOLDER%). Open a cmd window and @cd@ to this folder.

  ruby dk.rb init

Confirm that the config.yml contains your ruby path.

  ruby dk.rb install

Installing Jekyll

  gem install jekyll

Modifying Redcloth to work (only on 4.2.8)

Find redcloth.rb . It should be in a folder similar to C:\Ruby193\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems\RedCloth-4.2.8\lib.

On line 10, replace with prefix = '' This will allow it to find `redcloth_scan.so which is in the same folder.

(Optional) Modifying spawn to not use Posix

Find albino.rb. You’ll need to patch it using this fix.

In case that page goes missing:

  diff --git a/lib/albino.rb b/lib/albino.rb<br />
  index 387c8e9..b77d55e 100644<br />
  --- a/lib/albino.rb<br />
  +++ b/lib/albino.rb<br />
  @@ -1,4 +1,5 @@<br />
  require 'posix-spawn'<br />
  +require 'rbconfig'<br />
  <br />
  <br />
  =begin Wrapper for the Pygments command line tool, pygmentize. =end<br />
  @@ -84,11 +85,21 @@ class Albino<br />
    proc_options":timeout" = options.delete(:timeout) || self.class.timeout_threshold<br />
    command = convert_options(options)<br />
    command.unshift(bin)<br />
  -    Child.new(*(command + "proc_options.merge(:input => write_target)"))<br />
  +    if RbConfig::CONFIG"'host_os'" =~ /(mingw|mswin)/<br />
  +      output = ''<br />
  +      IO.popen(command, mode='r+') do |p|<br />
  +        p.write @target<br />
  +        p.close_write<br />
  +        output = p.read.strip<br />
  +      end<br />
  +      output<br />
  +    else<br />
  +      Child.new(*(command + "proc_options.merge(:input => write_target)"))<br />
  +    end<br />
    end<br />
  <br />
    def colorize(options = {})<br />
  -    out = execute(options).out<br />
  +    out = RbConfig::CONFIG"'host_os'" =~ /(mingw|mswin)/ ? execute(options) : execute(options).out