Install Hexo CMS (Node.js) on Ubuntu 16.04 / 18.04

Hexo is a simple and fast blog framework…. It is built for speed and great for anyone who wants to develop simple websites and blogs… Hexo supports all GitHub markdown features and uses Octopress plugins…

Hexo can easily be extended via its powerful plugin system which also supports Jade and CoffeeScript plugins…

Using Hexo to edit your content on the web should be easy and fun…. No need for learning templating and HTML…. It hides most of that stuff and focuses on what matters most.…..

Hexo offers features that may not be available to other PHP based CMS, like WordPress Joomla or Drupal… All you do is write your content and its instantly published… Other features like permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts are all top content and SEO friendly…

For more about Hexo, check its homepage….

This brief tutorial is going to show students and new users how to install Hexo on Ubuntu 16.04 / 18.04 and 18.10 systems.

These are the packages we’re going to be setting up…

Ruby version 2.5.3
Node.js 8

Step 1: Install Ruby

To install Ruby on Ubuntu, you’ll need to install some dependencies… To make that happen, install Node.js and Yarn repositories… This will make installing the dependencies easier…

First install these curl and git packages…

sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl git

Than run the commands below to add Node.js and Yarn repositories and keys to your system…. Then install some core packages to get your environment going…

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash -
curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs yarn zlib1g-dev build-essential libpq-dev libssl-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev software-properties-common libffi-dev

When you’re done… continue below:

After adding the repositories and installing necessary packages above, install Ruby with your local profile settings using rbenv… you’ll then use rbenv to install ruby-build…

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec $SHELL

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec $SHELL

After setting up your local profile… run the commands below to install Ruby version 2.5.3… If a newer version is available, replace the version number to that… visit this site to find out Ruby latest versions….

rbenv install 2.5.3
rbenv global 2.5.3

To verify that Ruby is installed, run the commands below:

ruby -v

You should see similar lines as below:

ruby 2.5.3p105 (2018-10-18 revision 65156) [x86_64-linux]

The steps above install Ruby on Ubuntu… Continue below to installing Hexo…

Step 2: Install Node.js

Now that Ruby environment is set up, run the commands below to install Node.js… Run the commands below to install Node.js repository, then install Node.js package…

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Now that Node.js is installed, run the commands below to install Hexo…

Step 3: Install Hexo

Now that your environment is ready, run the commands below to install Hexo globally and begin building your projects… The next command will create a new project folder called Hexo in your home directory…

You can name it whatever you like…

sudo npm install hexo-cli -g
cd ~/
hexo init hexo

After creating the project folder, change into it and start the server from there…

cd hexo
sudo npm install
hexo server

After a while, necessary packages should be installed and configured, ready to use.

http://localhost:4000

You should see Hexo home page…

Enjoy!

Congratulation! You have successfully installed Hexo on Ubuntu 16.04 / 18.04 / 18.10