Jekyll with Boxen

Not only does Jekyll power this blog but it has been one of the main tools I use on a daily basis for almost 2 months now. Due to it's growing role in our company I was starting to get fed up with having to manually pull down repositories and ask other team members to do the same, especially when all of our ruby projects are managed via Boxen. This post is to share my knowledge of how I was able to very easily modify a boxen project to work with an install of Jekyll instead of the default ruby setup.

To start with, you're going to want to navigate to your boxen repo directory which is installed at /opt/boxen/repo by default. Once there, create a new project in modules/projects/manifests called jekyll.pp. You may want to name this file the same as your project name (especially if you end up having multiple projects) but to keep things simple I will be referring to this file as jekyll.pp to make it easier to follow. The file contents should be as follows.

class projects::jekyll {
  boxen::project { 'jekyll':
    server_name   => 'jekyll.dev',
    source        => 'yourname/jekyll-project',
    ruby          => '2.0.0-p353',
    nginx         => "projects/shared/nginx.jekyll.conf.erb"
  }
}

I could have gone the route of building a custom puppet module but this way is way more straight forward and easier to work with. Each of these settings should be straight forward to anyone who's set up a boxen project before but for those who haven't I will explain what each one does.