A. Setting up

1. Clone Octopress to local machine

Clone the original octopress repo with the name I want for my blog. Running this will create an “ezrasuki.github.io” folder.

git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git ezrasuki.github.io

2. Install Octopress

bundle install
rake install

3. Configure Octopress

Open _config.yml and edit some attributes I want to change.

url: ezrasuki.github.io
title: .ezra.suki.
subtitle: Adventure of Ezrasuki
author: Ezrasuki
simple_search: http://google.com/search
description:

B. Writing a post locally

From the blog root directory (In my case, the ezrasuki.github.io folder I created by cloning), run this task:

rake new_post["Hello World"]

It will create a .markdown file under source/_posts, with a name that looks like: 2013-09-07-hello-world.markdown. Open and edit so it looks something like this:

---
layout: post
title: "Hello World"
date: 2013-09-07 23:18
comments: true
categories: [Test, Helloworld]
---

This is the content. You can write in markdown.

Note that “categories” are basically tags.

C. Preview blog

When done, generate HTML from the markdown with:

rake generate

To preview the post locally, run the following command, which will start a http://localhost:4000 server you can visit.

rake preview

C. Deploy to Github

There are many options for hosting, but I am hosting it on Github because it’s free.

1. Create a Github repo

Create a repo with the name of your blog. It should look like this: [your github username].github.io. Mine is ezrasuki.github.io

2. Connect Octopress with the Github repo

Octopress has a rake command which automatically takes care of all this. Run:

rake setup_github_pages

It will ask you the github repo url. Copy the clone URL from the Github repo and paste it here. It should look something like https://github.com/ezrasuki/ezrasuki.github.io.git.

3. Deploy

A. Deploy generated blog files

Finally, deploy all the local changes (including the new post) to Github pages repo by running:

rake deploy

B. Deploy source files

This only deploys the master branch, which contains the generated blog content. You may also want to push the source branch. The source branch contains everything except for the generated blog files. This includes: 1. Octopress source code 2. Markdown files for posts

Therefore it is a good idea to commit these too, in order to keep track of this side as well. Run the following:

git commit -am "Committing source"
git push origin source

Note that git push origin master has been already executed automatically when we ran rake deploy earlier. Again, that was for pushing the final static content. And this time, git push origin source is for pushing the source files.