Install Middleman 3 on Windows

Middleman is a static site generator based on Ruby. The Windows installation isn’t as easy as it should have been (at least for my case), so here are a few tips on getting things started.

1. Grab the Installers

As of 2014-01-27, I couldn’t get Ruby 2.0.0-p353 (x64) and Middlmean 3.2 to play nicely together. So, you may have to stick with the latest 1.9 version of Ruby.

Update! The problem was that eventmachine 1.0.3 couldn’t be installed in ruby 2.0.0. I have a detailed fix here.

Download Ruby and its corresponding development kit from here. Since Middleman is a Ruby gem, we’ll install that from the console in the coming steps.

2. Install Ruby

When installing Ruby, make sure to add Ruby executables to the PATH (everything is done from the command line). It should have installed to C:\ruby193 or whatever version/location you have. Next, extract the development kit to C:\ruby193\devkit. to install the development kit, open up a command prompt and run the following commands: (you might have to run them from the devkit folder)

ruby dk.rb init
ruby dk.rb install
gem update --system

3. Install Middleman

From the command prompt, run

gem install middleman

4. Setup Templates

The default templates should be located somewhere around

C:\Ruby193\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems\middleman-core-3.2.1\lib\middleman-core\templates

If you’re first starting out, take a look at the default templates and change them to your needs. In order to use your own template in windows, you will need to create a folder in the windows user directory called .middleman. To create a folder in windows that begins with a dot, you will need to add an additional dot at the end. Windows will automatically remove this extra dot. So this

C:\Users\username\.middleman.

becomes

C:\Users\username\.middleman

You can then create your own custom template folders within the .middleman folder. The custom template folder should contain a config.rb file and the source folder. As previously mentioned, you can check out the default templates to model these after.