Jekyll not serving site locally - ruby

Question

Configuration: OSX 10.9.1, ruby 2.1.1 via RVM
I have created a new Jekyll site via the command jekyll new sitename.
I then enter that directory and issue the command jekyll serve.
I get the following notice:
Configuration file: /Users/George/sitename/_config.yml
Source: /Users/George/sitename
Destination: /Users/George/sitename/_site
Generating... done.
Server address: http://0.0.0.0:4000
Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.
However when attempting to visit http://localhost:4000/ or http://0.0.0.0:4000/ my browser endlessly attempts to load the page.
I have checked and the site was built correctly including an index.html in /Users/George/sitename/_site/.
The _config.yml looks like so:
name: sitename
markdown: maruku
pygments: true
Does anyone know why Jekyll could be failing to serve the site but not throwing any errors?
Edit: If I change the port to 6000 and attempt to serve it then my browser instantly gives a page not found so there must be something interfering with port 4000 however the issue still stands.

Answer 1

It's likely that something else is using port 4000 on your computer. You can find out by running the following command:
sudo lsof -i :4000
As you can run the server on another port, we'll move on to the next issue, setting the baseurl. In your _config.yml you can specify which baseurl to use, this will be the url from which all pages are served, so if you had baseurl: http://myawesomesite.com, Jekyll will expect them to be accessed from that url.
As you're working locally, you have two options:
Set the baseurl to / in your _config.yml:
baseurl: /
Launch Jekyll with the --baseurl flag:
$ jekyll serve -w --baseurl '/'
Additionally, you could specify the port as a flag:
$ jekyll server -w --baseurl '/' --port 4000
If you want further information about what's going on when you run jekyll, you can run the command with the --trace flag:
$ jekyll server -w --trace