Setting Up Jekyll on Mac OS Catalina

Tony Mu

I have always been a Mac user, but recently I found myself getting more and more annoyed at the how developer unfriendly Mac OS has become over the past few versions. I have spent hours to research ways to bypass some native libraries shipped with the OS (Python 2.7, Ruby 2.6, etc.), or trying to tweak the path so a package I want to install does not use the system libraries.

Today I encountered another (multiple) problems while trying to install Jekyll on my Mac. For posterity I decided to write this blog post so if anyone trying to do the same thing in the future, they can avoid hitting some of the walls.

Install All Dependencies

You should follow the Jekyll installation page to install all required dependencies. Make sure to check them with the -v flag.

Commandline Tools

If you get this error

ld: unsupported tapi file type '!tapi-tbd' in YAML file

It is because only version 11.5 of Commandline Tools is compatible with Catalina to work with installing Jekyll. To install a previous version of the Commandline Tools¹:

1. First remove the current version of Commandline Tools

   sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
   

2. Then go to this link and download Commandline Tools for Xcode 11.5
3. Install the downloaded package and you should be all set!

Running Jekyll

When you run jekyll serve, you may get

You have already activated i18n 1.8.7, but your Gemfile requires i18n 0.9.5. Prepending `bundle exec` to your command may solve this. (Gem::LoadError)

You could use bundle exec jekyll serve instead, which will fix the error.

Missing Gems

If it complains about missing gems, run the following command to add the missing gems to the Jekyll’s Gemfile

bundle add {missing-package-name}

Finally…

Definitely feel free to reach out to me if you have other tips whilst installing Jekyll on Mac OS Catilina. I would be happy to update this blog post, so it can help more people!

Now enjoy writing blog posts with Jekyll!

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