Github Deploy

The Octopress Doco does a pretty good job but it misses out one crucial step.

• You need to commit the master branch and push it up to github.

But before you do please read on to see how to do that the octopress way.

Where are all my blogs and pages?

If you’ve followed octpresses Doco, then under your octopress directory you’ll have a source folder.

• Web pages are in directories directly under source.
• Blog posts are under the _posts directory.

running rake generate will copy the content to the _deploy directory and check it into git. running rake deploy commits it and pushes the deploy directory to github

Job done right?

Unfortunatly it’s not always that easy. All the code under source will be on the git branch source. If you follow the instructions in the doco you’ll commit this code and push it to git hub with this command

git add .
git commit -m 'your message'
git push origin source

This pushes your “source” to github into the source directory.

Why can’t I see my stuff in Github

The problem is the pages that get rendered as the blog in github is the stuff in the master branch. That was supposed to be pushed by running rake deploy

However sometimes that git simply failes to do that for you. Why? Well perhaps you have accidentally modified the code under _deploy and git is actually complaining but the rake task doesn’t show you that?

To check simply

cd _deploy
git status # notice that the _deploy dir is in the master branch :-)
git push origin master # this may fail and tell you why

For me the last step did fail. I fixed it by doing

cd _deploy
git fetch origin master
git merge origin/master  # you may need to fix conflicts here
git push origin master

And that sorted it :-)

From then on my rake deploy worked as expected. lesson learned, leave the _deploy dir alone!