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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T17:03:52+00:00

I’m about to go crazy here so I’ll just ask: How the hell do

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I’m about to go crazy here so I’ll just ask:

How the hell do you install the Ruby Gem Jekyll on Windows.

Jekyll depends on fast-stemmer-1.0.0 and that has to be built as a native extension

I found this handy guide on RubyDevKit to install a ‘sane’ environment on Windows and it works, but fast-stemmer is still hell bent on using nmake to build the binaries and that returns the following error:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC>gem install jekyll
Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing jekyll:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

C:/Ruby/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb
creating Makefile

nmake

Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version 10.00.30319.01
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

        cl -nologo -I. -IC:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-mswin32 -IC:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.
8/i386-mswin32 -I. -MD -Zi -O2b2xg- -G6  -c -Tcporter.c
cl : Command line warning D9035 : option 'Og-' has been deprecated and will be r
emoved in a future release
cl : Command line warning D9002 : ignoring unknown option '-G6'
porter.c
porter.c(31) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'stdlib.h': No such
file or directory
NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0
\VC\BIN\cl.EXE"' : return code '0x2'
Stop.


Gem files will remain installed in C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fast-stemmer-1
.0.0 for inspection.
Results logged to C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fast-stemmer-1.0.0/ext/gem_make
.out

I’m using the nmake that came with Visual Studio 2010 in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin as suggested in some other Article. But it still doesn’t work.

I’ve tried running the gem install from the MSYS shell that comes with the DevKit so I do have the Unix make at that point, but I don’t know how to instruct Ruby to use make instead of nmake (and reading the mkmf.rb didn’t enlighten me either). It’s hell bent on using nmake and that fails pretty with the above error message

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Update
I finally realized that I had not installed Ruby through RubyInstaller.org. I reinstalled using the Installer and now building jekyll with the DevKit works fine.

Thanks to everyone for pointing that out!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There is a confusion with the instructions you’re following. The instructions at RubyInstaller DevKit were created to support installation of extensions using RubyInstaller compiled versions of Ruby.

    It is clear, from your current directory (visual studio) and the output of the gem installation you’re using mswin32 based Ruby, which will not work with RubyInstaller or the DevKit we documented.

    Please install Ruby and the DevKit from RubyInstaller website and follow the instructions there and avoid mixing with Visual Studio

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