JDPFu.com 2025

A few days ago, a friend asked me what I’d suggest they do to get a website up and running AND he was headed towards a big, complex CMS, Content Management System. He wants to maintain a few websites, but most of it would be static webpages that need the same look-and-feel.

I don’t have anything against CMSs, I’ve tried and deployed more than a few of them. But for someone new to hands-on web site development, that isn’t the way to go when you work alone. Static HTML is what you need to start. A good templating engine is the second step. There’s a ruby program called webgen that does this. So, I decide to install the newest webgen on a virtual machine.

I already have ruby and rubygems installed in the normal Ubuntu way. This should be quick …. NOT!

The instructions for installing webgen say the easy way is: `sudo gem install webgen` – I get dependency errors, so I run it again, and again, and again and again until they are resolved. Nice.

Go to the area that I’d like to create my website and run `webgen create MySite` – webgen not found. Huh? I’ve become spoiled with Ubuntu installations. Programs that get installed just work, like you’d expect. There’s no mention of manual configuration required in the webgen documentation page. I search and discover there’s a different version of gem installed that isn’t compatible with some other dependency – fine. I try `sudo gem update` to update all gems on the system. More dependency issues – so I run it 5+ more times until they are resolved.

`webgen` still doesn’t work. I read a little more – it’s been over 2 hours screwing around with this stuff now. I create a softlink to ~/bin/ for it – no go, but at least the program is found. I export GEM_HOME and RUBYLIB environment variables. No joy. I try matching exact dependencies for webgen – and there are over 15 of them. How much more is needed to get this program working?

I’ll never know – after 3 hours of trying to setup webgen, I give up. Someone will call me an idiot on the blog a few hours, that’s fine. Clearly, someone with my minimal development experience and completely lacking in computer skills isn’t fit to run a trivial ruby program.

Oh, BTW, this blog has been running on a Ruby on Rails system, Typo, for over a year and I’ve been a programmer for over 20 years. Yep, I must just be stupid that gems was able to prevent my use of webgen.

Result – Ruby Gems Sucks.