5

Run Jekyll without errors

No BOM allowed

If there are BOM header characters in your UTF-8-encoded files, Jekyll will break. Make sure there are none.

Set your encoding to UTF-8

Depending on the version of Ruby and/or Jekyll you’re using, your site’s content, and maybe other factors, you may need to make sure Jekyll will read your site’s source as UTF-8.

If you followed this guide step by step or if your versions match the ones in this guide, you shouldn’t need to use any of the following fixes.

Set encoding option

Since Jekyll v1.3.0, you can specify the encoding in your _config.yml:

encoding: utf-8

Change console encoding

Alternatively, you can change your command line tool’s encoding to UTF-8 by running the following command every time you open a new console window.

chcp 65001

Use subfolders

Jekyll cannot build or serve sites from certain system-reserved folders on Windows, like your user folder. Instead, it will output an error looking like this:

C:\Users\You>jekyll serve
Configuration file: C:\Users\You\_config.yml
            Source: C:\Users\You
       Destination: C:\Users\You\_site
      Generating...
jekyll 2.4.0 | Error: Permission denied - .

If you encounter such an error, move your site to a subdirectory (e.g., C:\Users\You\awesome-jekyll-site) and try again.

The End

jekyll build
jekyll build --watch
jekyll build -w
jekyll serve
jekyll serve --watch
jekyll serve -w

You can now run all of the above commands on your Windows machine. Congratulations! You have successfully set up Jekyll on Windows.

Found something that wasn’t quite clear? Is something in this guide outdated? Did I forget something? Please look if somebody else noticed it already or file a new issue on GitHub if that’s not the case. Thanks!

If you need help with using Jekyll in general, please visit the official Jekyll website by clicking the button below.

Copyright © 2015 Julian Thilo, licensed under CC-BY-3.0.