While updating the new website, I came across an issue building the links for my website. To rewind a bit, I previously used Jekyll on version 3.3.0 or even earlier. Sometime between now and then, a new update rolled out that started using Bundler to bundle the gem dependencies for the project.
I read through the documentation and noticed that this would build a local development environment when using the build command. This part I understood somewhat. But I didn’t realize what that meant exactly. When I started building my site links, I noticed that any URLs that I had set a variable on with absolute_url would get written to the site as localhost:4000. I found this strange because I was using bundle exec jekyll serve each time, and it gave me 127.0.0.1:4000 as the server where my site is hosted. While it is technically the same as localhost:4000, I could not for the life of me figure out why and where it was getting rendered as localhost.
I looked in my _config.yml file and set the url: to https://www.jnutterdev.com, and then made sure my baseurl: config was empty. I looked through every freaking file I could think of and still could not figure out how my URLs were getting written as localhost. I was debating removing the absolute_url variable and then using static links instead, but that wasn’t really great because there were many links that relied on absolute_url.
I scoured Stack Overflow and even the Jekyll community forum for answers, and no one mentioned anything related. Until finally, I saw that someone mentioned needing to pass a production variable when using bundle exec, BUT this person placed the variable after the bundle exec command, and resulted in an error for me. I was getting closer, I knew it. Eventually, I looked through Jekyll’s documentation again and found the environment variable:
JEKYLL_ENV="production" bundle exec jekyll bThis command used the environment variables at the beginning of the command. After building the new production site, I then used scp to copy the _site folder to my server, and hey presto, it finally worked!
All this time, I was missing one key detail: JEKYLL_ENV="production". The documentation said that you should run this command. But nowhere did it say, “RUN THIS COMMAND IF YOU WANT YOUR ABSOLUTE URLS WRITTEN WITH YOUR SITE URL.” Jeebus. What a relief. I wish things would be a little clearer sometimes. That’s the part of learning new technology, I guess.
It dawned on me later that this is also the reason why another site of mine could never fully work as I wanted it to. I spent a week trying to get a site up, but eventually gave up on it since I could never figure out why my links weren’t working. I went back to my old site, re-cloned the repo, updated all the gem dependencies, ran the environment variable on build and what do you know — it worked! I feel so accomplished. It’s the little wins, right? I’m only operating on five hours of sleep because of this one little thing.