Installation Guides

Bridgetown is software written in Ruby, a friendly programming language that maximizes programmer happiness and makes it easy to build and customize open source projects. You will need to install Bridgetown as a Gem after you set up your Ruby language environment. You will also need to install Node to manage your website’s frontend assets.

For a quick summary of how to install Bridgetown, read Getting Started. What follows are more in-depth guides to setting up your developer or server environments.

Requirements #

If you don’t have some or all of these tools, our setup guides for macOS, Ubuntu Linux, and Ubuntu for Windows will help you install them.

GCC and Make (which you can check by running gcc -v,g++ -v and make -v).
Ruby version 3.2 or above (ruby version can be checked by running ruby -v)
Node version 22.21 or above (which you can check by running node -v)

Guides #

For detailed installation instructions, take a look at the guide for your operating system:

Gem Servers #

By default, Bundler will install gems from the RubyGems service. You can configure your Bridgetown project post-install to bundle via the alternative community gem server gem.coop by modifying the source at the top of your project’s Gemfile:

source "https://gem.coop"

In addition, you also have the option of loading first-party Bridgetown gems directly from our own canonical gem server, gems.bridgetownrb.com. For example:

source "https://gems.bridgetownrb.com" do
  gem "bridgetown"
  gem "bridgetown-feed"
end

The list of available gems is provided at the link.

Upgrading? #

We now have an official upgrade guide for migrating your Bridgetown website to v2.x.

Bundled Configurations