Setting up a Blog with Octopress on Heroku

•

Update: I moved this blog from Octopress to Jekyll hosted on GitHub on Sep 2014.

Getting Started

  1. Check your ruby --version, it must be at least 1.9.3.

  2. Download Octopress, then cd into your blog’s directory

$ git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git test-blog
$ cd test-blog
  1. Install dependencies
$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install
  1. Install default theme
$ rake install

Blog Configuration

I modified 4 sections of the _config.yml file as shown below.

Section 1: At the very top, contains your blog’s info

url: http://yoursite.com #=> http://fab9.net
title: My Octopress Blog #=> fab9
subtitle: A blogging framework for hackers. #=> code wheeeeeeeee
author: Your Name #=> Fabi
simple_search: https://www.google.com/search
description:

root: /
permalink: /blog/:year/:month/:day/:title/ #=> /blog/:year/:month/:day
source: source
destination: public
plugins: plugins
code_dir: downloads/code
category_dir: blog/categories #=> categories

Section 3: Asides

default_asides:
  [asides/recent_posts.html,
   asides/github.html,
   asides/delicious.html,
   asides/pinboard.html,
   asides/googleplus.html] #=>
  [asides/recent_posts.html,
   asides/github.html]

Section 4: 3rd Party Settings

Pretty self-explanatory. Checkout the docs for more details.

In your .gitignore remove the line public. Because Octopress compiles its generated content, i.e. static version of your site, into the public directory, we need to make sure everything in this dir is included in our git repo.

Get Ready to Write!

$ rake new_post["title"] # Creates post

$ rake generate # Generates the post into public/source/_posts
$ rake preview # Go to http://localhost:4000/ on your browser to preview.

Open up the generated file in a text editor. At the very top is a block of yaml code where you can change a few things.

At first it looks sort of like this:

---
layout: post
title: "First post"
date: 2014-07-12 11:03:38 -0400
comments: true
categories:
---

Here you can do a few things. For example:

  • When working on a draft add published: false.
  • Add one category categories: heroku, or many: categories: [heroku, git, octopress]

Octopress + Heroku

$ gem install heroku
$ heroku login

Pointing your custom domain to Heroku

Check out the docs at Heroku. Set your root domain, your-domain.com, to redirect to www.your domain.com.

Confirm that your DNS is configured correctly with the host command: $ host www.example.com // www.example.com is an alias for example.herokuapp.com

Deploy

 $ git push heroku master

Further Reading