Motivation

Same as the raison d’être in Using Octopress on Another Device in Blog 1.

Problem

When I wrote that post last year, I gave too little commands for the actual process of setting up the local repository. Yesterday, I re-read Robert Anderson’s post again, and tried reproducing the steps, and got some redundant Git branches.

My steps

Assume that throughout this post, the current working directoy is ~/octopress.

$ pwd
/home/owner/octopress
$ git clone -b source git@github.com:VincentTam/vincenttam.github.io.git .
Cloning into '.'...
remote: Counting objects: 71346, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (76/76), done.
remote: Total 71346 (delta 8), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 71266
Receiving objects: 100% (71346/71346), 63.71 MiB | 3.08 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (33764/33764), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

This is a standard command, and I first created the folder ~/octopress before cloning the source branch to the folder, so that my commands aren’t exactly the same as Anderson’s.

To make another difference, I also fetched the master branch from Octopress.

$ git remote add octopress git@github.com:imathis/octopress.git
$ git fetch octopress master
From github.com:imathis/octopress
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
 * [new branch]      master     -> octopress/master
$ git branch -av
* source                   bd39cb2 Corrected the MathJax syntax for X ~ Exp(λ)
  remotes/octopress/master 5080107 Fixed improper canonical url
  remotes/origin/HEAD      -> origin/source
  remotes/origin/master    7f8f845 Site updated at 2015-03-08 12:59:04 UTC
  remotes/origin/source    bd39cb2 Corrected the MathJax syntax for X ~ Exp(λ)

Since I dont’t and won’t have a Mac laptop, I skipped the command rbenv rehash.

Source: http://www.homelandsecureit.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/MacExplosion.jpg

I then viewed the task setup_github_pages in Rakefile, and discovered that if I cloned the whole remote repository of the Octopress blog into _deploy, the there’d be an extra master branch in the default deploy directory. To avoid this, I typed a longer command.

$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install
$ git clone git@github.com:VincentTam/vincenttam.github.io.git -b master _deploy
Cloning into '_deploy'...
remote: Counting objects: 71346, done.
remote: Compressing objects:  68% (52/76)   Receiving objects:   0% (1/71346)
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (76/76), done.
remote: Total 71346 (delta 8), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 71266
Receiving objects: 100% (71346/71346), 63.71 MiB | 2.77 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (33764/33764), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Checking out files: 100% (644/644), done.
$ cd _deploy && git branch -av && cd ..
* master                7f8f845 Site updated at 2015-03-08 12:59:04 UTC
  remotes/origin/HEAD   -> origin/source
  remotes/origin/master 7f8f845 Site updated at 2015-03-08 12:59:04 UTC
  remotes/origin/source bd39cb2 Corrected the MathJax syntax for X ~ Exp(λ)

To test if the last two words of the command in Anderson’s post could be omitted, I changed the Markdown source of one of my old posts slightly, committed the change and pushed it to GitHub.

$ gvim source/_posts/2014-03-16-latex-template-for-essays.markdown
$ git commit -am "Another small minor change" && git push
[source 4be7fba] Another small minor change
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
Counting objects: 10, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Writing objects: 100% (5/5), 435 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 5 (delta 4), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:VincentTam/vincenttam.github.io.git
bd39cb2..4be7fba  source -> source
$ cd _deploy/ && git branch -av && cd ..
* master		7f8f845 Site updated at 2015-03-08 12:59:04 UTC
  remotes/origin/HEAD   -> origin/source
  remotes/origin/master 7f8f845 Site updated at 2015-03-08 12:59:04 UTC
  remotes/origin/source bd39cb2 Corrected the MathJax syntax for X ~ Exp(λ)
$ cd _deploy/ && git pull && git branch -av && cd ..
* master		7f8f845 Site updated at 2015-03-08 12:59:04 UTC
  remotes/origin/HEAD   -> origin/source
  remotes/origin/master 7f8f845 Site updated at 2015-03-08 12:59:04 UTC
  remotes/origin/source 4be7fba Another small minor change

From Rakefile and the above highlighted command output, I could deduce that before starting to blog on another machine and publish them to GitHub Pages, one needed to pull the commits from the remote repository by git pull origin source and git pull in ~/octopress and ~/octopres/_deploy respectively.

Then I faced the same errors I saw yesterday.¹ After solving them, I proceeded to deploying the site to GitHub Pages.

$ rake deploy

...

 30 files changed, 44 insertions(+), 46 deletions(-)

## Pushing generated _deploy website
Counting objects: 130, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (64/64), done.
Writing objects: 100% (65/65), 5.37 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 65 (delta 35), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:VincentTam/vincenttam.github.io.git
   7f8f845..5af7b9d  master -> master

## Github Pages deploy complete
cd -

Lastly, I found that the remote tracking branch origin/master wasn’t necessary in ~/octopress. However, the creation of this branch couldn’t be avoided: using git clone to clone either the whole repository or a single branch only will lead the creation of all remote branches. To minimize the number of branches in the local repository for an Octopress blog, I suggest deleting the outdated origin/master branch.

$ cd _deploy && git branch -av && cd ..
* master                5af7b9d Site updated at 2015-03-09 06:54:16 UTC
  remotes/origin/HEAD   -> origin/source
  remotes/origin/master 5af7b9d Site updated at 2015-03-09 06:54:16 UTC
  remotes/origin/source 4be7fba Another small minor change
$ git branch -av
* source                   4be7fba Another small minor change
  remotes/octopress/master 5080107 Fixed improper canonical url
  remotes/origin/HEAD      -> origin/source
  remotes/origin/master    7f8f845 Site updated at 2015-03-08 12:59:04 UTC
  remotes/origin/source    4be7fba Another small minor change
$ git branch -rd origin/master
Deleted remote branch origin/master (was 7f8f845).

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