Reinstalling Jekyll and Bundler (GHP Part 1.1)

In my first post about setting up Ruby and Jekyll on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Ubuntu 20.04, I made a mistake: I used sudo to install a bunch of Ruby-related “gems,” including bundler, a crucial tool for running Ruby apps, and jekyll.

This caused problems later, so I decided to unwind things. Two terrific blog posts by Moncef Belyamani helped me understand both why and how to do so:

one explaining why you should never use sudo to install ruby gems, and
his definitive guide to installing ruby gems on a mac. (I’m using Ubuntu under WSL, so some adaptations were needed.)

In the ruby-installation guide, Moncef recommends using a Ruby installation manager, such as rbenv or chruby (see the Ruby docs).

But for me, that ship had sailed. I had already installed Ruby systemwide using the Ubuntu package manager (apt install etc.). I didn’t want to unwind that. So I chose Moncef’s third, non-recommended option:

Enable user-based (non-sudo) installation of gems despite having a system-wide install of Ruby.

I have no desire to be a Ruby developer, so this was the right approach for me, since it meant that I didn’t need to entirely reinstall Ruby. This worked for me:

Step 1: Get rid of bundler and jekyll.
```
  sudo gem uninstall jekyll bundler
```
- I got a bunch of prompts and warnings to deal with, but they all made sense, and I uninstalled everything that I was able to uninstall.
Step 2: In home directory (cd ~) create a .gemrc file, and update the .bashrc file, to enable user-based installation of gems.
- The .gemrc file is only one line (this specifies that gems will be installed in user space, not systemwide):
```
  gem: --user-install
```
- The .bashrc file needs two lines, which update your path and create an environment variable (note: you may have to use a different version number for Ruby in the PATH statement; check the directory in your system):
```
  export GEM_HOME="$HOME/.gem"
  export PATH="$HOME/.gem/ruby/2.7.0/bin:$PATH"
```
- Force bash to reread the .bashrc file:
```
  source ~/.bashrc
```
Step 3: As regular user, not sudo, reinstall bundler and jekyll and update gems (order of commands doesn’t matter here):
```
  gem update
  gem install bundler
  gem install jekyll
```
- This makes these gems available to the user, but not yet to a particular project, such as my Jekyll site (i.e., the directory in which my GitHub Pages site is found).
Step 4: Update project so that it uses the newly installed user-space gems (jekyll and bundler). Within project directory:
```
  bundle install
```
That was it! Since the Jekyll project already included a Gemfile and a Gemfile.lock that documented all the gems needed for the project, bundle install was able to read those files and find what it needed. To preview:
```
bundle exec jekyll serve
```