Setting up Jekyll locally on Ubuntu

First note, how I actually got started with this site locally on my Linux Mint 18.3 installation. Following the Setting up your GitHub Pages site locally with Jekyll guide I got stuck at Step 3 (optional): Generate Jekyll site files. It says to run:

$ bundle exec jekyll _3.3.0_ new NEW-JEKYLL-SITE-REPOSITORY-NAME
> New jekyll site installed in /Users/octocat/NEW-JEKYLL-SITE-REPOSITORY-NAME.

However, this resulted in “Could not locate Gemfile or .bundle/ directory”. I found suggestions that “ruby-all-dev” needed to be installed on Ubuntu but it was already installed. After some trial and error I found that leaving out “bundle exec” from the command line made it work. Just running:

$ jekyll new nikstra.github.io

successfully created the site.