Upgrading Octopress

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One of the criticisms of Octopress is how there’s no clear separation of the static generation engine and the content of one’s website, and thus upgrading Octopress is difficult. I delayed upgrading due to this. However, my concerns were unfounded, as it was very painless to upgrade Octopress.

The instructions boil down to this short help page on Updating Octopress: 

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git pull octopress master     # Get the latest Octopress
bundle install                # Keep gems updated
rake update_source            # update the template's source
rake update_style             # update the template's style

The first step resulted in a few merge conflicts. I find RubyMine’s git conflict resolution tools helpful, so I used those. Here’s a short screencast (embedded below) showing you how these tools helped with this process. Besides some minor issues dealing with a few merge conflicts, there was nothing very interesting or eventful about the upgrade, which means that the current process is really quite OK.

I hope a few people find this demo of the RubyMine git conflict resolution tool helpful. The key takeaways from this video are:

  1. Merge conflicts show up as red in the list of changes.
  2. Try the diff’ing buttons in the upper left to get 2 way views of the 3 way merge.

3, “Yours” means your local changes, and “Theirs” means the server’s changes, or, in this case, the changes in the main Octopress development branch.

Did the upgrade work? You’re looking at the results of it.

It’s worth noting that I had one slight snag. When I merged sass/screen.scss, I accidentally removed this line, which is used for the youtube plugin. 

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@import "custom/rve";

I could have figured this out by examining the history of the file and noting that I had added this line, rather than it being part of Octopress. So yes, it would be bit better if there was a cleaner separation between the Octopress code and any enhancements. However, the current mechanism works, and it’s still thousands of times better than WordPress.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.railsonmaui.com//blog/2013/09/15/upgrading-octopress/