Installation

Middleman is distributed using the RubyGems package manager. This means you will need both the Ruby language runtime installed and RubyGems to begin using Middleman.

Mac OS X comes prepackaged with both Ruby and Rubygems, however, some of the Middleman's dependencies need to be compiled during installation and on OS X that requires Xcode. Xcode can be installed via the Mac App Store. Alternately, if you have a free Apple Developer account, you can just install Command Line Tools for Xcode from their downloads page.

Once you have Ruby and RubyGems up and running, execute the following from the command line:

$ gem install middleman

This will install Middleman, its dependencies and the command-line tools for using Middleman.

The installation process will add one new command to your environment, with 3 useful features:

$ middleman init
$ middleman server
$ middleman build

The uses of each of these commands will be covered in the next section, Start a New Site.