Octopress

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

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'octopress', '~> 3.0.0.rc'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install octopress --pre

Octopress Commands

Here are the subcommands for Octopress.

init <PATH>         # Adds Octopress scaffolding to your site
new <PATH>          # Like `jekyll new` + `octopress init`
new post <TITLE>    # Add a new post to your site
new page <PATH>     # Add a new page to your site
new draft <TITLE>   # Add a new draft post to your site
publish <POST>      # Publish a draft from _drafts to _posts
unpublish <POST>    # Search for a post and convert it into a draft
isolate [POST]      # Stash all posts but the one you're working on for a faster build
integrate           # Restores all posts, doing the opposite of the isolate command

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

Option	Description
--template PATH	Use a template from
--date DATE	The date for the post. Should be parseable by Time#parse
--lang LANGUAGE	Set post language (e.g. en, it) for multi-language sites.
--slug SLUG	Slug for the new post.
--dir DIR	Create post at _posts/DIR/.
--force	Overwrite existing file.

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

Option	Description
--template PATH	Use a template from
--title TITLE	The title of the new page
--date DATE	The date for the page. Should be parseable by Time#parse
--lang LANGUAGE	Set page language (e.g. en, it) for multi-language sites.
--force	Overwrite existing file.

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"

Option	Description
--template PATH	Use a template from
--date DATE	The date for the draft. Should be parseable by Time#parse (defaults to Time.now)
--lang LANGUAGE	Set draft language (e.g. en, it) for multi-language sites.
--slug SLUG	The slug for the new post.
--force	Overwrite existing file.

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.

Option	Description
--date DATE	The date for the post. Should be parseable by Time#parse
--slug SLUG	Change the slug for the new post.
--dir DIR	Create post at _posts/DIR/.
--force	Overwrite existing file.

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 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.

Variable	Description
date	The date (if set) or Time.now.iso8601
title	The title of the page (if set)
slug	The title in slug form
ymd	The date string, YYYY/MM/DD format
year	The date's year
month	The date's month, MM
day	The date's day, DD

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.

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

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/octopress/octopress/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request