I mentioned in a previous post that I couldn’t use the latest version of Jekyll (v1.4.3 at the time of this post) and included a reference to a stackoverflow post. While what I have to say is nothing you wouldn’t be able to find out on your own by following that thread, maybe I can summarize it for you.

Jekyll commands:

jekyll build
jekyll serve

Resulted in this nonsense:

C:\Users\campbeja\Projects\campbeja.github.io>jekyll build
 
Configuration file: C:/Users/campbeja/Projects/campbeja.github.io/_config.yml
 
Source: C:/Users/campbeja/Projects/campbeja.github.io
 
Destination: C:/Users/campbeja/Projects/campbeja.github.io/_site
 
Generating... C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/1.9.1/fileutils.rb:247:in `mkdir': Invalid argument - C:/Users/campbeja/Projects/campbeja.github.io/_site/C: (Errno::EINVAL)

Notice the extra C: in the last line? For reasons that I still don’t fully understand, a Ruby script received an invalid file path. I had no idea how, am not familiar with Ruby, and my Google searches failed to find similar reported issues (this was back in December 2013 or January 2014.) Eventually I started looking at Ruby files listed in the stack trace.

Inexperienced with Ruby, I managed to debug by typing print statements throughout the called methods to show values returned, modified, digitally enhanced or whatever. I was lead to Page.rb’s desitination() in the Jekyll source code. Though I identified that it was there that the file path string was getting messed up—I didn’t know how to fix it and by this point I was fed up and focused on something else for a win.

Luckily when I returned to this issue, someone else had reported this issue (see linked stackoverflow post) and Jekyll contributors were already talking about it.

Looks like Windows users will have to stick with version 1.4.2 until Jekyll v2.0.0 is out.