Using Slate Natively

This page is for installing and using Slate on the native OS, as opposed to using Vagrant or Docker.

Dependencies

Minimally, you will need the following:

Please note, only Linux and macOS are officially supported at this time. While slate should work on Windows, it is unsupported.

See below for installation instructions for different OSes / distros.

Install Ruby, NodeJS, and tools for compiling native ruby gems:

On Ubuntu 20.04+

sudo apt install ruby ruby-dev build-essential libffi-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev nodejs patch

On Fedora 31+

sudo dnf install @development-tools redhat-rpm-config ruby ruby-devel libffi-devel zlib-devel xz-devel patch nodejs

Then, update RubyGems and install bundler:

sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install bundler

*Note

If you get the following error

ERROR: Your RubyGems was installed trough APT, and upgrading it through RubyGems itself is unsupported.

try the following commands instead:

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y bundler

First, install homebrew, then install xcode command line tools:

xcode-select --install

Agree to the Xcode license:

sudo xcodebuild -license

Install nodejs runtime:

brew install node

Update RubyGems and install bundler:

gem update --system
gem install bundler

Fork this repository on Github.
Clone your forked repository (not our original one) to your hard drive with git clone https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/slate.git
cd slate
Install ruby gems for slate:

# either run this to run locally
bundle install

Note: if the above fails on installing nokogiri and using macOS see here for some helpful tips on things that might help.

You can run slate in two ways, either as a server process for development, or just build html files.

To do the first option, run:

bundle exec middleman server

and you should see your docs at http://localhost:4567. Whoa! That was fast!

The second option (building html files), run:

bundle exec middleman build