Ubuntu 18.04 & 20.04 installation Guide

[nzkozar]

Ubuntu 18.04 & 20.04 installation Guide

Why?

I've been using slate now for almost a year and have gone through the painful installation process on Ubuntu environments enough times to realize that this project really needs a 1 place guide on the process of setting up the whole thing.

Guide

Issues that you are likely to run into when setting up a fresh slate project on a relatively "clean"/"fresh" Ubuntu installation and their solutions:

1. Missing ruby files:

Example:

An error occurred while installing fast_blank (1.0.0), and Bundler cannot continue.

Further running gem install fast_blank -v '1.0.0' will state the following:

mkmf.rb can't find header files for ruby at /usr/lib/ruby/include/ruby.h

Solution: Install ruby-dev using apt install ruby-dev libffi-dev build-essential
(Credits: copiousfreetime/hitimes#68 (comment))

2. Missing zlib:

Example:

zlib is missing; necessary for building libxml2
*** extconf.rb failed ***

This usually gets thrown at nokogiri gem installation step

Solution: Install zlib using sudo apt-get install libpng-dev
(Credits: sparklemotion/nokogiri#1667 (comment))

3. Could not find a JavaScript runtime:

slate's README suggests adding rubyracer gem to the projects gemfile. After adding it, and running bundle exec middleman build, the console sadly returns the following error:

ExecJS::RubyRacerRuntime is not supported. Please replace therubyracer with mini_racer in your Gemfile or use Node.js as ExecJS runtime.

**Solution: ** Install nodejs using apt install nodejs
**Note: ** I tried using mini_racer gem instead of nodejs, as the error suggested, but that ended up on the middleman getting stuck and printing out several lines of

WARNING: V8 isolate was forked, it can not be disposed and memory will not be reclaimed till the Ruby process exits.

The closest I got to an explanation why is this post (https://www.bountysource.com/issues/62461413-handling-of-v8-isolate-was-forked) although admittedly I didn't look too far before trying nodejs

4. Can't find gem bundler (>= 0.a)

Running bundle install throws the following error

Traceback (most recent call last):
	2: from /usr/local/bin/bundle:23:in `<main>'
	1: from /usr/lib/ruby/2.5.0/rubygems.rb:308:in `activate_bin_path'
/usr/lib/ruby/2.5.0/rubygems.rb:289:in `find_spec_for_exe': can't find gem bundler (>= 0.a) with executable bundle (Gem::GemNotFoundException)

Solution: update to the latest RubyGems sudo gem update --system
(Credits: https://bundler.io/blog/2019/05/14/solutions-for-cant-find-gem-bundler-with-executable-bundle.html)

Note: according to the above article, this problem is only possible with ruby versions below 2.6.3. Mine was at 2.5.1 when I encountered this problem, which supports this claim.

Disclaimer:

I hope this guide helps others who encounter problems with their installations and it serves as a 1 stop solution for those problems.

If you find other problems with solutions that you think should be added to this guide, comment bellow.

This same process has shown to be repeatable for me on 4 different Ubuntu installations in the past, all of them 18.04.

This process might be a bit different from one installation to another, depending on what you already have installed on the system from other sources/software.

[multisme]

thanks, helped a lot

[dextertd]

I ran into all 3 of these issues. How is it that every single error code is useless? Your guide solved everything! Cheers mate, you've saved me a whole bunch of time!

[goinnn]

@lord please could you add this comment to README file? I was lost 3 hours... and finally I found this issue and thanks of this info I fixed my problems

@nzkozar Thanks!

[nzkozar]

Added a solution for issue number 4: Can't find gem bundler (>= 0.a). Hope it helps other lost souls 💪

[MasterOdin]

Thanks for this. I've folded in the dependencies and such into the wiki here: https://github.com/slatedocs/slate/wiki/Using-Slate-Natively#installing-dependencies-on-ubuntu-1804. As part of the instructions, I've included installing nodejs and the other dependencies as well as running gem update --system to hopefully avoid the above errors altogether.

[nzkozar]

Awesome. I've just managed to set it all up on my new Ubuntu 20.04 system and it worked perfectly with just the wiki instructions.