Jekyll Liquid Exception Error

tl;dr If you’re running Jekyll on Arch linux and run into a Liquid Exception error, make sure python2 is installed.

While building my website on a frest ArchLinux virtual machine via vagrant, I ran into the following issue:

❯ jekyll build
Configuration file: /home/vagrant/code/akenn.org/_config.yml
            Source: /home/vagrant/code/akenn.org
       Destination: /home/vagrant/code/akenn.org/_site
      Generating... which: no python2 in (/home/vagrant/.gem/ruby/2.0.0/bin:/home/vagrant/.rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p451/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/bin:/home/vagrant/.rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p451/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/heroku/bin:/home/vagrant/.dotfiles/bin:/home/vagrant/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/core_perl:/home/vagrant/code/tools/mongodb/bin:/home/vagrant/code/tools/adt/sdk/platform-tools:/usr/local/share/npm/bin/:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/home/vagrant/.cabal/bin)
  Liquid Exception: Failed to get header. in _posts/2013-03-04-upgrading-python.markdown
error: Failed to get header.. Use --trace to view backtrace

If we look closely we see:

which: no python2 in (/home/vagrant/.gem ...

I use Arch Linux, which if I remeber correctly installs python3 and not python2 by default. Let’s check.

❯ python --version
Python 3.3.5

Yep. If we also look at the path jekyll is spitting out in that error message /usr/bin is in there, which is where python3 resides. My guess is if we install python2 it’ll be put in /usr/bin as well. Then if we run jekyll again, it’ll check that directory, find python2, and be happy.

Let’s install python 2 with:

❯ sudo pacman -S python2

Now if we run it…

❯ jekyll build
Configuration file: /home/vagrant/code/akenn.org/_config.yml
            Source: /home/vagrant/code/akenn.org
       Destination: /home/vagrant/code/akenn.org/_site
      Generating... done.

Great success!