RVM:

Ruby Version Manager

RVM is the Ruby Version Manager. It’s the one thing you might need to install on your machine if you want to maintain pages using GitHub pages and Jekyll, although this is entirely optional

Using GitHub pages without installing RVM

When using GitHub pages to publish your site, strictly speaking you don’t need to install any software on your local machine.

GitHub automatically runs Jekyll each time you push changes to GitHub, and this generates your site.

If there are errors,

• you sometimes get an email from GitHub letting you know.
• you can also configure Travis-CI to run Jekyll in parallel, and look for error messages this way.

You’ll probably end up wanting it though

However, it is handy to be able to run Jekyll locally for several reasons:

• When making big changes to the site, it’s nice to preview them locally before they go live. Having RVM installed allows you to do that.

• If you make a change that results in a syntax error, you might be able to debug this from the error messages you get from GitHub Pages and/or Travis-CI. But it’s much easier to debug this if you run the site locally.

Installing RVM

The instructions for installing RVM are here: http://rvm.io/

Note that for MacOS, you may want to do three things first:

• Install Homebrew first, the open source package manager for MacOS. You are installing this so that you can get two things that the RVM install instructions require:
• Install gpg2 via brew install gpg2
• Install curl via brew install curl

Using RVM

You typically don’t need to interact with RVM directly. Once it is installed, it is invoked when needed by the ./setup.sh and ./jekyll.sh scripts that are included in your repos from the [Boilerplate files](/topics/boilerplate/.