Building gems from github source
04 Jun 2010
Gems, Github, Ruby, and Jekyll
I’ve been trying to create a blog for several months now with Rails being the framework of choice behind a lot of my failed attempts.
Having been not to pleased with having to store blog content in a database, I was thrilled with finding Jekyll, a Ruby based site generator which takes Liquid templates and textile to provide the main driving force for creating content.
The only problem is that the latest released gem 0.5.7 has a couple of issues and there isn’t a way (to my knowledge) to vendor it – like you would do for edge Rails.
To get the latest (and greatest) version of Jekyll the best thing to do is to create your own gem from Tom Preston-Werner’s repository on github:
$ git clone http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll.git jekyll-source
$ cd jekyll-source
$ gem build jekyll.gemspec
$ gem install jekyll-0.5.7.gem
After that, you should be able to continue to use Jekyll as documented by the manual.
The same procedure could be used with a fork of a project where all you need to do is fork a repository and fix a bug. This way you can continue working from a specific revision of a branch (stable 2.3 Rails) + include your fix for a bug which could then be fed upstream.