Octopress

Some notes on setting up Octopress to work with GitHub pages.

You, too, can have a glamorous GitHub page like mine! http://charlesreid1.github.io/

Setting Up Octopress with GitHub Personal Page

A user can create a repository to host static pages that are available at http://username.github.io. These pages can be set up to use Octopress, a slick blogging platform that uses Ruby and Jekyll underneath the hood.

You can create an Octopress blog that's available at http://username.github.io. Here's how I created mine.

First of all, I wanted to be able to blog with Octopress from my netbook or from my Macbook. I found a fantastic guide that described how to do this. I'll repeat my procedure here, again, mainly because this is all for my own notes, so I remember what I did.

Create Your Repo

You first have to create a git repository with the name username.github.io. I'll just use my own username charlesreid1 from this point on. Call me vain, but you know, these are just notes for myself anyway.

So now I have a repo named "charlesreid1.github.io".

What I'm gonna do is use some Ruby code (specifically, Octopress (and Jekyll, on top of which Octopress runs)) to dump out a bunch of CSS stylesheets and HTML files that contain a nice, pretty blog. All of the static content will have been generated from a pile of markdown files that contain a simple header and then a bunch of markdown text.

Get rbenv

There are a lot of different versions of ruby out there. Various versions have various uses, but this leads to some version confusion. What we'll do is use a program called rbenv (ruby environment - get it?) to manage our ruby installation and its corresponding gems (gems are like ruby packages).

OS X

To install this on OS X, I used Homebrew:

brew update
brew install rbenv
brew install ruby-build

Linux

I wanted to install this on my Netbook running Ubuntu 12.04. I read that Ruby 1.9 had some serious flaws (just hearsay), so I'm using 2.0, specifically ruby 2.0.0p247. That means YOU CANNOT USE THE rbenv AND ruby-build IN THE APTITUDE REPOSITORIES!

You need the bleeding edge stuff. Here's how I installed that:

First, I installed rbenv from sstephenson on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc

When you start a new shell, you should be able to type

type rbenv

and see:

rbenv is a function
rbenv ()
{
[...]

YAAAYYYY!!!

Next, install ruby-build from sstephenson,

git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build

And now you should be able to use ruby-build to access various Ruby builds, which you can install and manage with rbenv.

Installing Ruby 2.0

Now all that's left is to install Ruby 2.0 using rbenv:

rbenv install 2.0.0-p247

This will take a while. If it looks unresponsive, just pop open another tab and run "top". You'll see either the C compiler or a ruby process cranking away on the CPU until its done.

Once you've installed your version, you gotta pick which version is going to be your main ruby version.

First, see if there's already a ruby (maybe a system ruby? old crusty ruby? who knows):

which ruby
ruby --version

Who cares about that. Let's use our own damn rbenv Ruby!!!

Wait, what Ruby versions do we have?

rbenv list
rbenv versions

Oh, yeah, of course. Let's use Ruby 2.0.0-p247, which should have been listed in the output of the command above:

rbenv local 2.0.0-p247

Now we have our correct version of Ruby (2.0.0-p247) set. Voila!

Getting the Octopress Gem Bundle

The way Ruby works is, you create gems, which are a bit like Ruby apps, or plugins, or modules. These entities, whatever, these gems, they have general utility stuff like processing markdown or, you know, stuff, and like, stuff. I have no idea.

Anyway, which gems you need to install is project specific. That means your site will have some file that specifies which gems to install. BUT WHICH ONES? WHAT DO I DO???

Relax. That's what Octopress is for.

Octopress takes care of what gems to install and how to turn markdown into pretty web stuff. You just write the markdown.

Get Octopress

Get Octopress here: https://github.com/imathis/octopress

Documentation for it here: http://octopress.org/

git clone https://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress

Install Gem Bundle

You will first want to install the gem bundle that Octopress requires. So go to the Octopress repo and run:

cd octopress
gem install bundler

NOTE: If your system can't find "gem", you probably haven't picked your Ruby version correctly, or you have set up your initialization incorrectly.

This will install a bunch of gems that will now be available for Ruby. Note that these gems will be available EVERYWHERE. The reason they have to be run in this project folder is, out there in the wild there are lots of gems, but only a couple are needed by any given project. So for efficiency, each project keeps a list of which gems it needs. That's what the install command is doing.

Rehash rbenv

Once you'e installed your gem bundle, you gotta rehash your rbenv:

rbenv rehash

Install the Bundle

I dunno why you gotta run this extra step. Seems dumb to me. But just do it.

bundle install

The End Result

Now what you have is a couple of utilities that allow you to deploy a copy of Octopress on Ruby in a Github repository. Then you can use Octopress to make/modify content, and when you're all done, run it through Octopress to make static pages that are then updated in the Github repository.

Still With Me?

We're almost done.

Make Your Repo Into A Blog

Next step is to use some of those handy-dandy utilities we just installed with the Octopress gem bundle to create a bunch of static blog content in our repository.

cd charlesreid1.github.io/
bundle exec rake setup_github_pages

NOTE: The bundle exec rake prefix is necessary because we want to make sure and use the rbenv-installed version of ruby, the same one that corresponds to the gem bundle we installed for Octopress. We do that by using bundle exec rake instead of just rake. This will ask you for the address of your repository. This will allow you to deploy updated blog content using ruby.

Now if we want to make a post, we can use rake:

bundle exec rake new_post['This is gonna be a great post!']

Then it will tell you it made a markdown. Then you can edit the markdown to make a post:

---
layout: post
title: "This is gonna be a great post!"
date: 2014-04-07 18:38:21 -0700
comments: true
categories:
---

## It Works!

This post is definitely ready for some Markdown:

```python
for i in range(10):
    print i
```

Hosting Your Repo Blog Locally (Testing)

(Add more here later)

Pushing Your Changes to Live Site

You can push your changes to the live site using the following code:

bundle exec rake generate

This will turn all the markdown posts and other stuff you've modified into static content.

Next, you can (OPTIONALLY) update your site's "source code" branch:

git add .
git commit -am "Updating site source branch"
git push origin source

Finally, you can use a rake script that will take care of updating the master branch and pushing all your changes to the live GitHub site:

bundle exec rake deploy

This will push all the changes to _deploy, which is a copy of the master branch. The master branch is the branch that is served by the webserver when you visit http://charlesreid1.github.io

Setting Up a Second Octopress with the Same Personal GitHub Page

If you want to blog using Octopress in parallel, with two machines, then you can follow these instructions.

Preparing Your Second Octopress

First, you can save yourself a lot of time by following all of the above instructions with respect to installing Ruby and the gem bundle for Octopress. This assumes that all of the rake commands provided by the Octopress gem bundle are available to you.

Okay, let's begin by cloning the repository for our site. BUT WAIT!!! Due to the way that our site was organized by our original call to rake setup_github_pages was to put the live site in the master branch, and the Octopress/Ruby stuff in the source branch. So let's make sure and check out the source branch:

git clone -b source https://github.com/charlesreid1/charlesreid1.github.io.git charlesreid1.github.io/

Now all of the static content was put (by the rake github pages command) into a folder called _deploy, which was made into the master branch. But because the name has an underscore in front, it is ignored by git. So let's explicitly check it out with Git. Remember the master branch is the default branch if we don't specify one:

cd charlesreid1.github.io/
git clone https://github.com/charlesreid1/charlesreid1.github.io.git _deploy

Now we can repeat some of the above commands in our fresh repo to generate content.

Everything up to this point was installation procedure.

Using Your Second Octopress

Now you can run command like

bundle exec rake new_post['This post is coming from another computer']

and then modify the corresponding markdown file.

Once you're ready to deploy all the changes you've made, you just run the same commands as before. Optionally:

git add .
git commit -am "Updating site source"
git push origin source

and then deploy the changes made to the live site (the master branch) using rake deploy:

bundle exec rake deploy

Setting Up Octopress with Github Project Pages

We saw above that Octopress enables you to set up an Octopress directory to work with a Github personal page repository.

But we may also want to set up Octopress for a project page repository - so that we can keep static web content relevant to the project that consists of a project blog and a set of project pages.

Octopress/Octopress with Github Project Pages