Upgrading WSL2 to Ubuntu 20.04 and running Jekyll

2020-04-28T09:00:00.000+09:30

Ubuntu LTS 20.04 just came out, and you can either install into WSL2 from the Windows Store, or if you already had Ubuntu for WSL then you can upgrade that in place using sudo do-release-upgrade -d.

There's a few confirmation prompts along the way. Eventually you'll get to a point where it wants to reboot. The trouble is if you try sudo reboot it will complain that you're not running systemd and give up.

The solution is to jump back to Windows and run wsl --shutdown, then relaunch Ubuntu and it should be happy.

Jekyll

Having a freshly upgraded install of Ubuntu, I thought it was time I got a local copy of Jekyll so I could preview my blog posts.

To ensure that I'm using the same Gems that GitHub Pages use, I updated my Gemfile to just reference the github-pages gem.

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'github-pages'

And then install Jekyll prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full -y
sudo apt-get install build-essential dh-autoreconf -y
sudo apt install zlibc -y
sudo apt install libxml2-dev -y
sudo apt install libxslt-dev -y

Tell Ruby to install Gems locally (so we don't need sudo)

echo 'export GEM_HOME=~/.ruby/' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:~/.ruby/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

gem update

gem install pkg-config -v "~> 1.1"
gem install nokogiri -- --use-system-libraries

bundle install

Migrating from Blogger to Jekyll and GitHub Pages

2019-06-11T08:00:00.000+09:30

I've been in a bit of a blogging slump the last few months. Partly because I've been particularly busy, but also I've been a bit frustrated with Blogger. I used Windows Live Writer (later Open Live Writer), but sadly after all the effort to make it open-source, the project has kind of floundered with no one apparently leading the project now.

So what to do? Well maybe it's time to move to a different platform. I'd see a few people with their blogs on GitHub, and after a bit of research I settled on using Jekyll with GitHub pages.

How I migrated from Blogger

I followed this useful checklist - https://thefriendlytester.co.uk/2017/07/blogger-to-jekyll-migration-timeline. Note that the jekyll-importer does not convert Blogger content to Markdown (that had me confused for a few hours).

I stuck with the same URL format for posts, so that should mean no broken links.

I made use of Windows Subsystem for Linux to run Jekyll locally (as I'd read it wasn't so easy to get running natively on Windows). See below for more details of getting that all running.

Update Cloudflare to point to flcdrg.github.io - https://blog.cloudflare.com/secure-and-fast-github-pages-with-cloudflare/

Update FeedBurner settings to point to new source RSS feed.

What I forgot

I use dlvr.it to post to Twitter about new blog posts. I should have disabled that as it got confused by the change and thought I'd posted some new articles.

Still to do

The Blogger migration only copied text. Images are still living in their original locations. It would be good to migrate them over too.

My old blog had a nice Archive/history listing. I've started looking at Jekyll equivalents, but not found one that's similar yet.

Getting Jekyll running on WSL

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install ruby
sudo apt install ruby-dev
sudo apt install make gcc
sudo apt install g++
sudo apt install zlibc
sudo gem install pkg-config -v "~> 1.1"
sudo apt install libxml2-dev
sudo apt install libxslt-dev
sudo gem install nokogiri -- --use-system-libraries
sudo gem install jekyll-import
sudo gem install jekyll

With my locally cloned Git repo at C:\dev\git\flcdrg.github.io in Windows, in WSL I could change to the equivalent path at /mnt/c/dev/git/flcdrg.github.io, and then run jekyll server.

Anything else?

Let me know in the comments if something is broken that used to work!

David Gardiner - Jekyll