syllogismos

Octopress Blog as User Page in Github, Using Windows

Step by step instructions to install an Octopress blog on Windows to set up your GitHub user page.

  • Download RubyInstaller and ruby dev kit from here and here
  • The above installer installs Ruby 1.9.3, even though the most recent stable version is > 2.0.0
  • Go to the directory where the dev-kit is installed and do the following
> cd ruby-dev-kit
> ruby dk.rb init
> ruby dk.rb install
  • Set up Octopress, change to the directory where you want your blog to reside
> git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress
> cd octopress
  • Install dependencies
> gem install bundler
> bundle install
  • Install default Octopress theme.
> rake install
  • Configure your blog by updating _config.yml, name of your blog, your name and things like that.
  • Create a new repo of the form YOUR-GITHUB-USER-NAME.github.io in GitHub
> rake setup_github_pages
# this command will ask your for your github pages url, so type 
https://github.com/YOUR-GITHUB-USER-NAME/YOUR-GITHUB-USER-NAME.github.io
  • and run the following commands to deploy your local blog to GitHub
> rake generate
> rake deploy
# what this does is basically makes the master branch of your github repo contain all the generated
# files namely _deploy folder in your directory.
  • If everything worked fine, you will be able to see your blog with the default Octopress template on YOUR-GITHUB-USER-NAME.github.io
  • Every time you update your blog you need to do rake generate and rake deploy, these commands will push your changes to your master branch on the remote
  • You can make a new post using rake new_post command
> rake new_post["My first Blog Post"]
  • The above command creates a new markdown file in source/_posts folder, write your blog in markdown
  • Commit the changes you made locally in your local branch source
> git status
# this will show that there are changes in the folder source/_posts
> git add .
> git commit -m "my first blog post"
  • If you want, you can create a new branch called source in your remote repository for the source files
> git push origin source

This is what you do every time you create a new post

> rake new_post["new blog post"]
> rake generate
> rake deploy # to deploy static files in the remote master branch.
> git add . # or you can specify the markdown file
> git commit -m "new blog post"
> git push origin source # to push the source files to the source branch

I only did this because my newly minted blog doesn’t contain many entries :D