Getting up to speed with Ruby 2.7 and Jekyll on Manjaro

I’ve recently switched from the Debian verse (Ubuntu, specifically) to the world of Arch Linux based distribution, Manjaro. It has been a fun roller-coaster ride so far and still learning something new every day while doing development on this system.

In this blog, I am going to share the experience of building and running my Jekyll based blog site(yes, the one you are reading this blog post on right now 😉)

At first, I installed ruby and jekyll on Manjaro using

yay -S ruby
gem install jekyll bundler

and tried to build the website.

bundle install && bundle exec jekyll serve

The command failed with the error message specified below-

# Your user account isn't allowed to install to the system RubyGems.
# You can cancel this installation and run:

bundle config set --local path 'vendor/bundle'
bundle install

As expected, I ran the suggested commands and everything went smooth.

Now comes the time to build the website again and run the server. This time I encountered another error stating-

jekyll 3.9.0 | Error:  no implicit conversion of Hash into Integer
/home/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.0.0/gems/pathutil-0.16.2/lib/pathutil.rb:502:in `read': no implicit conversion of Hash into Integer (TypeError)
	from /home/rishabh/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.0.0/gems/pathutil-0.16.2/lib/pathutil.rb:502:in `read'
	from /home/rishabh/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.0.0/gems/jekyll-3.9.0/lib/jekyll/utils/platforms.rb:75:in `proc_version'
	from /home/rishabh/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.0.0/gems/jekyll-3.9.0/lib/jekyll/utils/platforms.rb:40:in `bash_on_windows?'
	from /home/rishabh/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.0.0/gems/jekyll-3.9.0/lib/jekyll/commands/build.rb:77:in `watch'
	from /home/rishabh/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.0.0/gems/jekyll-3.9.0/lib/jekyll/commands/build.rb:43:in `process'
	from /home/rishabh/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.0.0/gems/jekyll-3.9.0/lib/jekyll/commands/serve.rb:93:in `block in start'
	from /home/rishabh/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.0.0/gems/jekyll-3.9.0/lib/jekyll/commands/serve.rb:93:in `each'
	from /home/rishabh/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.0.0/gems/jekyll-3.9.0/lib/jekyll/commands/serve.rb:93:in `start'
	from /home/rishabh/dev/rishabh96b.github.io/vendor

After some research, I found out that the Github-Pages uses Jekyll 3.9, which isn’t compatible with Ruby 3 and downgrading to Ruby 2.7 should solve this problem.

I removed ruby binaries from the system and searched to install the specific version of a package using pacman . This surprisingly led me to the conclusion that specifying a version while installing a package is not easy in arch-based systems as it is with apt package manager in Debian based distributions. So we cannot do something like sudo pacman -S ruby=2.7 in Manjaro.

Solution? There are “time machine” repositories out there where people just store old packages. We just need to find those and install them using pacman

I found out that Ruby v2.7 is available as package ruby2.7 and installed it along with the bundler

yay -S ruby2.7 ruby2.6-bundler

There was another caveat with this as checking the ruby installation with ruby -v and gem -v and hooray, it did not work. Instead, the binaries are named as ruby-2.7 and gem-2.7. The workaround was to alias it to ruby and gem respectively.

alias ruby=ruby-2.7
alias gem=gem-2.7

It is time to install jekyll again as I removed it along with the latest ruby binary with the command gem install jekyll bundler and got slapped with permission error this time.

Permission denied @ rb_sysopen - /usr/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/cache/eventmachine-1.2.7.gem (Errno::EACCES)

As it is not recommended to install gems(gem install) as root , I turned to the sudo for my solution to this problem. I could have chowned /usr/bin directory but chowning a root user owned directory is not recommended as it does not have any potential benefits and can break your system. As you might have guessed already, running the above command with sudo was successful.

sudo gem install jekyll bundler

And then I attempted to run the website server again and this time the service ran smoothly.