Octopress
From charlesreid1
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 Personal GitHub 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 only reason they have to be run in this project folder is because there are a lot of gems, and only a couple are needed by any given project. So you only have the gems you need.
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: "New Pojects"
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
```