octopress

Octopress

Octopress is an obsessively designed toolkit for writing and deploying Jekyll blogs. Pretty sweet, huh?

Installation

Install Octopress manually:

$ gem install octopress

Or if you use Bundler, add this line to your Gemfile:

gem 'octopress', '~> 3.0'

And then run:

$ bundle

New to bundler? Run gem install bundler then create a file named Gemfile in your site's root directory with the following content:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'octopress', '~> 3.0'

Run bundle to install the gems specified in your Gemfile.

Configuration

Octopress reads its configurations from _config.yml. Here's what the configuration looks like by default.

# Default extension for new posts and pages
post_ext: markdown
page_ext: html

# Default templates for posts and pages
# Found in _templates/
post_layout: post
page_layout: page

# Format titles with titlecase?
titlecase: true

# Change default template file (in _templates/)
post_template: post
page_template: page
draft_template: draft

Octopress CLI Commands

Here are the subcommands for Octopress.

…

Run octopress --help to list sub commands and octopress <subcommand> --help to learn more about any subcommand and see its options.

Init

$ octopress init <PATH> [options]

This will copy Octopress's scaffolding into the specified directory. Use the --force option to overwrite existing files. The scaffolding is pretty simple:

_templates/
  draft
  post
  page

New Post

This automates the creation of a new post.

$ octopress new post "My Title"

This will create a new file at _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-my-title.markdown with the following YAML front-matter already added.

layout: post
title: "My Title"
date: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS-00:00

Command options

New Page

Creating a new page is easy, you can use the default file name extension (.html), pass a specific extension, or end with a / to create an index.html document.

$ octopress new page some-page           # ./some-page.html
$ octopress new page about.md            # ./about.md
$ octopress new page docs/               # ./docs/index.html

If you are working with collections, you might add a page like this:

$ octopress new page _legal/terms        # ./_legal/terms.html

After the page is created, Octopress will tell you how to configure this new collection.

Command options

Note: The default page template doesn't expect a date. If you want to add dates to your pages, consider adding date: {{ date }} to the default template _templates/page, or create a new template to use for dated pages. Otherwise, you will have the --date option to add a date to a page.

New Draft

This will create a new post in your _drafts directory.

$ octopress new draft "My Title"

Publish a draft

Use the publish command to publish a draft to the _posts folder. This will also rename the file with the proper date format.

$ octopress publish _drafts/some-cool-post.md
$ octopress publish cool

In the first example, a draft is published using the path. The publish command can also search for a post by filename. The second command would work the same as the first. If other drafts match your search, you will be prompted to select them from a menu. This is often much faster than typing out the full path.

When publishing a draft, the new post will use the draft's date. Pass the option --date now to the publish command to set the new post date from your system clock. As usual, you can pass any compatible date string as well.

Unpublish a post

Use the unpublish command to move a post to the _drafts directory, renaming the file according to the drafts convention.

$ octopress unpublish _posts/2015-01-10-some-post.md
$ octopress unpublish some post

Just like the publish command, you can either pass a path or a search string to match the file name. If more than one match is found, you will be prompted to select from a menu of posts.

Templates for Posts and pages

Octopress post and page templates look like this.

---
layout: {{ layout }}
title: {{ title }}
---

Dates get automatically added to a template for posts, and for pages if a --date option is set.

You can add to the YAML front matter, add content below and even use liquid tags and filters from your site's plugins. There are a handful of local variables you can use when working with templates.

By default Octopress has templates for pages, posts and drafts. You can change them or create new ones for different types of content. To create linkposts template, add a file at _templates/linkpost, such as:

---
title: {{ title }}
external-url: {{ url }}
---

Then you can use it with a new post like this:

$ octopress new post "Some title" --template linkpost
$ octopress new post "Some title" -tm _templates/linkpost

In the second example, I'm passing the full template file path. This way I can use my shell's tab to auto-complete feature.

When creating templates, file name extensions are unnecessary since the files are just plain text anyway.

Isolate

The isolate command will allow you to stash posts in _posts/_exile where they will be ignored by Jekyll during the build process. Run octopress integrate to restore all exiled posts. This can be helpful if you have a very large site and you want to quickly preview a build for a single post or page.

$ octopress isolate                                # Move all posts
$ octopress isolate _posts/2014-10-11-kittens.md   # Move post at path
$ octopress isolate kittens                        # Move post matching search

In the third example, if multiple posts match the search a prompt will ask you to select a post from a menu.

Deploying your site

The Octopress gem comes with octopress-deploy which allows you to easily deploy your site with Rsync, on S3 or Cloudfront, to GitHub pages, or other Git based deployment hosting platforms.

Once you've built your site (with jekyll build) you can deploy it like this:

$ octopress deploy

This reads a _deploy.yml configuration and deploys your site. Read below to learn how Octopress can generate a deployment configuration file for you.

Note: The _deploy.yml is processed through ERB, which makes it easy to load configurations from environment variables.

Deploy has a few commands you should know.

Generate Deployment configuration

Remember to add your configuration to .gitignore to be sure you never commit sensitive information to your repository.

Octopress can generate a deployment configuration file for you using the octopress deploy init command.

$ octopress deploy init s3
$ octopress deploy init rsync
$ octopress deploy init git [email protected]:user/project

This will generate a _deploy.yml file in your current directory which you can edit to add any necessary configuration.

If you like, you can pass configurations as command line options. To see specific options for any method, add the --help flag. For example to see the options for configuring S3:

$ octopress deploy init s3 --help

If you want to publish your site to a staging server, you can create a second configuration. For example, to setup rsync for a staging site, you'd do this.

$ octopress deploy init rsync --config _staging.yml

After modifying the configuration file, you can deploy your site to it like this:

$ octopress deploy --config _staging.yml

Git Deployment Configuration

Only git_url is required. Other options will default as shown below.

Rsync Deployment Configuration