jtdp

Ideas, snippets and randomness.

Installing Octopress on Windows 7

Octopress is a pretty sweet blogging framework built on Jekyll. It’s a nice bit of kit that can easily be set up to create and deploy a blog to Github or your own server / webhost. I wanted to be able to use it from my Windows 7 laptop, so I googled around and figured out how to get everything set up. For reference - and in the likely event that I forget how I did it, I’m posting my findings in this - my first Octopress post.

Git Installation

First up, we need git. Grab github for windows from github and run the install.
I’m keeping my projects in C:\Users\John\Documents\GitHub. Open up a cmd terminal, cd to wherever you set your git projects directory to be, and test that git is working.

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cd C:\<path-to-git-projects>
git --version

Yari installation

Yari is Yet Another Ruby Installer. Basically, it helps you to install different versions of Ruby on your system and is very easy to use in a Windows environment.
Installing Yari is pretty damn easy now we have git installed. If you aren’t there already, cd to your git projects directory and run:

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cd C:\<path-to-git-projects>
git clone git://github.com/scottmuc/yari.git yari

All you need to do now is add the yari executable to your path. If you’re not sure how to do this, follow the steps below:

  • Left click Start, right click Computer, left click Properties
  • Left click Advanced system settings
  • Left click Environment Variables
  • In the System Variables list, find Path, select it and left click Edit
  • Add ;C:\<path-to-git-projects>\yari\bin\yari to the end of it - not forgetting the semi-colon at the beginning and click Ok to close the Environment Variables window.
  • Click Ok on the Advanced system settings window to close that. You can also close the System window.
  • Close your terminal and reopen it to reload the changed path. Type yari to test it is working.

Ruby installation

Now we have yari, installing Ruby is superfantastically easy. We’re going to install version 1.9.3. At the command prompt type:

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yari 1.9.3

The first time this is run, it can take a few minutes as it will need to download and install that version of Ruby. It doesn’t give you much feedback while it does, so be patient! Once done, check it worked with:

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ruby --version

Note: If you open a new terminal later on today, tomorrow or next week, you need to type yari 1.9.3 again to set the Ruby version for that session. As it was already installed the first time the command was run, it takes no time at all when run on subsequent occasions.

Octopress installation

Octopress is hosted on Github, so its just a matter of cloning it and running a few commands to get it rolling. There’s a set up guide on the Octopress site which is worth a look if you need any help. Clone the Repo

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cd C:\<path-to-git-projects>
git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress
cd octopress

Install Dependencies

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gem install bundler
bundle install

Set Up Octopress with the Default Theme

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rake install

Take a Look

At this point you have an empty Octopress blog. To see what it looks like, we can fire up the built-in development webserver using the following command:

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rake preview

Now, point your browser at http://localhost:4000 to see what all the fuss is about.

The World Wide Web

The built-in development server is a super useful tool for developing your blog and previewing content before you publish it, but it ain’t going to make you famous. Fortunately, deploying this baby is a piece of proverbial cake. I’m using Github Pages for hosting my Octopress blog: it’s easy, they have a marginally better server stack than I have and it doesn’t me cost a penny. Again, there’s a guide on Octopress about how to set this up.

Get a Github Account

If you don’t already have one, sign up here

Create a Repo

Create a repository to put your blog in. As per this page, your repository should be named according to the scheme username/username.github.io. Your blog will be accessible at the url: http://username.github.io

Do the Magic

From your Octopress project directory, run the following command:

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rake setup_github_pages

When asked, enter your the repository url that you just created. This will be in the form git@github.com:username/username.github.io.git

To publish your blog to Github pages use:

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rake generate
rake deploy

You should then be able to see it at your Github pages url: http://username.github.io

Note: The rake generate command, takes the source code for the blog and turns it into good old html, css and javascript. The rake deploy command fires the generated files up to the master branch of your git repository from where they are published in Git Pages.

We also want to commit the source files for the blog to the source branch of the repository:

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git add .
git commit -m 'your message'
git push origin source

Do the Work

So far we’ve got an empty, uncustomized blog. Time to make it yours and add some content. Head over to the Octopress Basic Configuration and Blogging Basics pages to get you going. Just remember, when you’ve changed content or configuration and want to publish to your Github Pages site, run:

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rake generate
rake deploy