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Some Updates for Jekyll + GitHub Pages

GitHub Warning

When viewing the blog repository, GitHub showed a warning — clearly indicating that a dependency needed updating:

We found a potential security vulnerability in one of your dependencies.
The redcloth dependency defined in Gemfile.lock has a known moderate severity security vulnerability in version range < 4.3.0 and should be updated.

So I ran the updates:

sudo gem update jekyll
sudo gem update bundler
sudo bundle update

nokogiri Installation Error

During bundle update, the following error occurred:

Installing nokogiri 1.8.1 (was 1.6.7.2) with native extensions
Gem::Ext::BuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

This turned out to be a nokogiri dependency issue. After trying several solutions, this one finally worked:

sudo gem install nokogiri -v '1.8.1' -- --use-system-libraries --with-xml2-include=/usr/include/libxml2 --with-xml2-lib=/usr/lib

With nokogiri successfully installed, running:

sudo bundle update

completed without errors.

Startup Warnings

There were warnings on startup that I couldn't leave alone:

$ bundle exec jekyll serve
Configuration file: /Users/qd-hxt/Documents/gworkspace/tonyh2021.github.io/_config.yml
       Deprecation: The 'gems' configuration option has been renamed to 'plugins'. Please update your config file accordingly.
            Source: /Users/qd-hxt/Documents/gworkspace/tonyh2021.github.io
       Destination: /Users/qd-hxt/Documents/gworkspace/tonyh2021.github.io/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
   GitHub Metadata: No GitHub API authentication could be found. Some fields may be missing or have incorrect data.
    Liquid Warning: Liquid syntax error (line 8): Expected end_of_string but found close_round in "tag in tag_words)" in tags.html
                    done in 9.032 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/Users/qd-hxt/Documents/gworkspace/tonyh2021.github.io'
    Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000//
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

The first warning is about gems being renamed to plugins: simply replace gems with plugins in _config.yml.

The second is the GitHub Metadata warning, which is a bit more involved — see the next section.

The third is a Liquid syntax error. The reported line number may not account for comments, so just carefully inspect and fix the syntax.

Handling the GitHub Metadata Warning

This error occurs because gem 'github-pages' is used in the Gemfile. The fix involves adding a GitHub token and a cert file.

  1. Follow the instructions in Create a personal access token — when selecting scopes, check repo.

  2. Open .bash_profile (or .zshrc, or whichever shell config you use) and add the following line, replacing the placeholder string with your newly generated token:

export JEKYLL_GITHUB_TOKEN=abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123

  1. Download the cacert.pem file from here. Save it to your project directory and add *.pem to .gitignore.

  2. Add the path to cacert.pem in your .bash_profile (or .zshrc, or other shell config):

export SSL_CERT_FILE=/Users/your/projects/paths/cacert.pem
  1. Restart the terminal and run the startup command.

The server starts without any warnings. All issues resolved.