Running Jekyll on Ruby 3.4

Yesterday I’ve installed the newly released Ruby 3.4, but this caused an issue with Jekyll:

bundler: failed to load command: jekyll (/Users/bbatsov/.rbenv/versions/3.4.1/bin/jekyll)
<internal:/Users/bbatsov/.rbenv/versions/3.4.1/lib/ruby/3.4.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:37:in 'Kernel#require': cannot load such file -- csv (LoadError)
        from <internal:/Users/bbatsov/.rbenv/versions/3.4.1/lib/ruby/3.4.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:37:in 'Kernel#require'
        from /Users/bbatsov/.rbenv/versions/3.4.1/lib/ruby/gems/3.4.0/gems/jekyll-4.3.4/lib/jekyll.rb:28:in '<top (required)>'
        from <internal:/Users/bbatsov/.rbenv/versions/3.4.1/lib/ruby/3.4.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:37:in 'Kernel#require'
        from <internal:/Users/bbatsov/.rbenv/versions/3.4.1/lib/ruby/3.4.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:37:in 'Kernel#require'
        from /Users/bbatsov/.rbenv/versions/3.4.1/lib/ruby/gems/3.4.0/gems/jekyll-4.3.4/exe/jekyll:8:in '<top (required)>'
        from /Users/bbatsov/.rbenv/versions/3.4.1/bin/jekyll:25:in 'Kernel#load'
        from /Users/bbatsov/.rbenv/versions/3.4.1/bin/jekyll:25:in '<top (required)>'

At first I thought that updating to the latest version of Jekyll¹ with bundle update would be enough to address this problem, but it turned out that wasn’t the case.

It wasn’t hard to guess that the csv library has been removed from Ruby’s stdlib in Ruby 3.4, as the process to move non-essential libraries out of the standard library has been ongoing for years now. So, I’ve added csv to my Gemfile, did a bundle install and… got an error that base64 was missing as well… Oh, well…

At the end of the day the solution to the problem is to add these 2 lines to your Gemfile:

# TODO: Remove when this gets fixed in Jekyll
gem "csv"
gem "base64"

Don’t forget to run bundle install afterwards.

Eventually those libraries will be made Jekyll runtime dependencies and when a new version of Jekyll is released with this change, you can remove them from your Gemfile. I’ve noticed there’s already a Jekyll PR to address this problem, but it might be a while until it’s merged and a new release is cut. Sadly, Jekyll is pretty close to abandonware these days and every time something like this happens I’m thinking that I should probably look more closely into the alternatives.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

1. That’s Jekyll 4.3 at the time I’m writing this. ↩