Ruby pain

The main problems installing octopress is that it relies on a ruby environment. This would be fine except it also relies on Ruby having been compiled with certain libraries available in order for the bundler to work as per the octopress doco.

Missing libraries

During the Octopress install Ruby or rbenv or bundler will moan that Ruby needs to be compiled with zlib or OpenSSL. to get these on ubuntu do:-

apt-get install zlib1g-dev
apt-get install libssl-dev openssl
apt-get install -y libreadline-dev

if you are not on ubuntu look at this blog for common ruby gotchas and solutions on different Linuxes.

Install Ruby

Then as per the Octopress Doco install Ruby except where it shows >> ~/.bash_profile instead you shoul send it to ~/.bashrc or else each time you open a Terminal in your desktop you’ll need to source ~/.bash_profile so instead do this :-

cd
git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git .rbenv
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
source ~/.bashrc

Now each time you open a terminal from your Desktop environment it’ll make sure that rbenv and ruby are in your path, allowing octopress rake commands to work.

Once that is done the Octopress install, as per this doco, should work fine… well…. it worked on my machine (Ubuntu 14.4 ;-) )