Using Octopress 3

Octopress is “an obsessively designed toolkit for writing and deploying Jekyll blogs.” A blog post earlier this year by author Brandon Mathis described frustrations with Octopress 2, along with plans for Octopress 3. I didn’t use Octopress before, so I can’t tell you anything about how much better or worse the newest Octopress is. This release feels like a straightforward and useful extension to Jekyll. Apparently the older releases did not.

Instructions for installing and using Octopress 3 are on Github. Here is what I did to incorporate and use the new Octopress on my site.

I need to install Octopress 3 first, obviously.

$ gem install octopress

Octopress provides a handful of commands for creating and managing content in a Jekyll site. I head into my site folder and start things off with octopress init.

$ cd randomgeekery.org
$ octopress init
Added Octopress scaffold:
 + _templates/
 +   draft
 +   page
 +   post

init creates the templates that will be used by other Octopress commands.

I’ll start with the draft for this post.

$ octopress new draft "Using Octopress 3"
New draft: _drafts/using-octopress-3.markdown

I add my content, drink some coffee, and fix the most grievous errors in my draft. Time to publish the draft. Octopress commands can complete partial filenames. Let’s see if that works.

$ octopress publish octopress
Published: _drafts/using-octopress-3.markdown → _posts/2015-07-12-using-octopress-3.markdown

Sure does. That is convenient.

Wait. I organize _posts by category folders. I’ll back out of the last publish and try again with a location specified.

$ octopress unpublish octopress
Unpublished: _posts/2015-07-12-using-octopress-3.markdown → _drafts/using-octopress-3.markdown
$ octopress publish octopress --dir tools
Published: _drafts/using-octopress-3.markdown → _posts/tools/2015-07-12-using-octopress-3.markdown

I already have my own deployment script, so for now I will not worry about the Octopress deploy command. I’ll just publish it.

Oh before I do that, I just want to mention that Octopress 3 does a great job streamlining management of individual posts. I like it.

Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-01-26