Installing Al Folio

The recommended approach of running Jekyll inside GitHub Actions seemed too slow, which was why I wanted a local version.

The recipe that worked (after a few false starts) was exactly what they proposed:

• Install WSL. Luckily, WSL itself was already on my computer, and so I just had to run wsl --install -d Ubuntu-24.04 and wsl --distribution Ubuntu-24.04, which landed me in an Ubuntu bash session, complete with mount points for a Unix filesystem and the Windows C: drive. (I didn’t understand their point about only needing to go up to step 4, but luckily things turned out OK).

• Install Docker. This was the hardest stage because of confusion between docker compose and docker-compose, and false starts with apt-get install docker and accidentally running too old a version of Ubuntu. (It wasn’t helped by terminology like docker.io, docker-ce and snap docker). It turns out that the Linux distros haven’t necessarily packaged the latest version of Docker, and that it is better to install directly from the Docker apt repository. Then sudo docker compose pull and sudo docker compose up launched some Docker thing that conjured up the al-folio website on http://localhost:8080/al-folio/ and responded to edits to my ~/git/al-folio/_pages/about.md.

After those setup steps, I found I could cd to another al-folio (called my-al-folio on my C: drive), and get things going again just with sudo docker compose up.