servr::jekyll does not render knitr-jekyll MWE correctly inside RStudio

Question

I was trying to get Yihui's fantastic knitr-jekyll boilerplate to work inside RStudio.

Here's what I did:

• git clone knitr-jekyll repo (at this commit)
• (If I didn't have a clean git clone, make sure \_site is empty and kill past rendered 2014-09-28-jekyll-with-knitr.md)
• run jekyll() inside RStudio

I get this as a preview in RStudio (same in the browser):

Oddly, now, if I delete or overwrite \_site and have Jekyll do the serving on the terminal, things work out:

$ jekyll serve

So it seems like calling Jekyll on the terminal works just fine, based on the *.md produced by servr::jekyll via knitr, but servr::jekyll somehow chokes on the styling.

I'm not sure what's going on here, or on whose end the problem might be.

Any thoughts?

---

I got:

• jekyll 2.5.3 on the terminal
• jekyll 1.4.3 in RStudio via system("jekyll --version") (yikes! That could be the problem!)
• servr 0.2.0 from CRAN

Answer 1

Yeah, so, the PATH conundrum struck again: For some reason I had a stray, old jekyll in /usr/bin/, which is where RStudio looked first.

> system("which jekyll")
/usr/bin/jekyll

To fix this, I just deleted that stray, old jekyll, and RStudio would continue searching to /usr/local/bin/jekyll which is where gem install jekyll had apparently left it.

> system("which jekyll"
/usr/bin/local/jekyll

Done.

Seriously, though, I get nightmares from all things PATH.