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Comment by n8henrie | Hacker News Reader

I could care less about faster, but I would sure love to switch from Jekyll to something that builds from a statically linked binary.

I only put our blog posts a couple times per year, but it seems that the Jekyll dependencies move beneath my feet and break routinely. This is especially a pain because Jekyll and homebrew are the only ruby projects I work with frequently, and so I'm always at a loss for how to fix things -- rbenv, updating gemfiles, do I need to gem or rake or bundler something, architecture-specific problems with C dependencies, yuck.

For now I just put everything into nix which seems ok, but I think I may make a third attempt at switching to Hugo soon, or maybe this, or maybe cobalt.

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I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who constantly ran into issues with Jekyll. The last time was particularly bad. Even after removing my whole Ruby environment and setting things up from scratch I couldn't get things running again due to mysterious compilation issues so I eventually gave up.

Luckily my use case is super basic (just a personal website with a bunch of my projects), so a good solution for me was to switch to a custom Python script that pulls in liquid and markdown packages and has just enough features I need to generate my site.

I can relate to this. I blog sporadically, using different computers, and every time I had to pull the repo and get it to run, several things would break, resulting in a very painful dependency management process (I must admit that I lacked experience with ruby projects in general).

After porting my blog to Hugo, having a single binary that can perform all tasks on all three operating systems I use (MacOS, Windows, and Linux) is a blessing, and now the blog builds incredibly quick.

With a Gemfile and Gemfile.lock you really don't need to do any of that. The only thing that you will need to do is "bundle install" once your Ruby version is updated, which can be prevented by not updating Ruby. I just locked the ruby version in my package manager as I only use Ruby for Jekyll.

Other than that: if it works today, it should still work in a year, or 2 years, or 5 years.

> The only thing that you will need to do is "bundle install" once your Ruby version is updated, which can be prevented by not updating Ruby. I just locked the ruby version in my package manager as I only use Ruby for Jekyll.

I'm not sure that's a good idea. While you might avoid unexpected updates to Ruby, you'll also avoid security patches for CVEs.

Which CVEs are you going to find in a static website generator?

Try using Jekyll via Docker. The whole stack is managed without mucking around the rest of the system, and trivial to update.

I can also relate to this. As wonderful as ruby can be, my install (or lack of, then install) always seems to break when I get back to it after some time away.

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