At last booted the Raspberry Pi 4 today, a 32 GB EVO+ starter kit with 8 GB of RAM from CanaKit. I received it as a Christmas gift two Christmases ago, and have finally got around to the project.
The plan is to turn the pi into a webserver so I can host my own site. Previously, I’ve used GitHub pages and the native Jekyll functionality therein, but I want to learn how to do it all myself. I thought about making an even simpler site without Jekyll, but I like the functionality and the cleanliness of the folder structure. As well, an important feature for me is being able to add markdown files that get built to html. I write in markdown, and like to have my source files in that format for human legibility and long term durability, as well as for being convertible to other formats via pandoc.
First step after system configuration was to install Ruby, and I immediately ran into problems. Ruby kept getting errors because everything installed was out of date. But I couldn’t update anything because the mirror certificate could not be verified. Every time it tried to update via http://mirror.switch.ca/ it threw an error. After a lot of searching, I came across this brief post: https://dev.to/ryderdamen/fixing-broken-mirrors-raspberry-pi-1een. Following the instructions here, I used sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list to access the list of mirrors, and replaced the listed mirror with deb http://raspbian.freemirror.org/rasbian/ buster main contrib non-free rpi (not https, which gave me more errors). I was then able to run sudo get-update, which was now able to update everything, taking about 45 minutes to do so.
I then proceeded to install Ruby, but when I went to install Jekyll it failed to build. The quick start instructions on the homepage are misleading. I was missing dependencies that I found on the installation page. First, I updated RubyGems to latest, v3.3.24, which also took a significant amount of time, mostly on installing documentation. Then, I realized I’d used a slightly incorrect command to install Ruby on Raspbian, so re-ran, this time with ruby-full.
Having completed the full install, I noticed that the command had installed Ruby v2.5.5p157 by default. I wanted to update this to latest as well to align with RubyGems, which meant I needed to install RVM. It failed on the first attempt, so I installed gnupg2 as recommended. However, the install failed again, so I tried to fetch the public key from the key server. This also failed, so I at last had to curl the .asc files directly. Finally, I was able to install RVM, and proceed to update Ruby to v3.1.2.
After checking GCC and Make, I then followed the simple directions to point my environment variables to ~/.bashrc, and following that, ran gem install jekyll bundler to finally install Jekyll.
I started to get my site directory set up, and was ready to preview. And then Jekyll wouldn’t run. Now at almost 1 AM, I threw in the towel for the night.