Stop Jekyll Upgrades

I build my blog with Jekyll and I love it. But I dread any time I accidentally update the Jekyll gem. Everything breaks and it takes a lot of trial-and-error to get things working again. It doesn’t help that I’m a noob at Ruby, RubyGems, and the internal workings of Jekyll.

Today, I’m putting a stop to this madness and using the Ruby bundler for its designed purpose and am version-locking Jekyll to version 2.4.0:

# Lock Jekyll to version 2.4.0 in the Gemfile
echo "" >> Gemfile && echo "gem 'jekyll', '2.4.0'" >> Gemfile

# Back up Gemfile.lock. You can delete this if everything succeeds after.
mv Gemfile.lock Gemfile.lock.backup

# Reset all Gems
sudo bundle clean --force
bundle install

# Run Jekyll, but use bundle exec to run the specific version
bundle exec jekyll serve --watch

Note that commands like jekyll and rake now need to be run with through bundle exec. If you just run jekyll directly, it’ll run the most up-to-date one that is installed to your default path.

This setup now lets me take control of when I’ll have to suffer through a Jekyll upgrade.

P.S. I still <3 you Jekyll!