Octopress Plugins: s3_website

Originally posted on joev.me @ 2013-11-25

I’m hosted on S3 thanks to this blog post by Robert Brewitz. Do take a moment to read his post. My first swing at setup took me about a day to wrap my head around. After the next couple tries/tests, plugging-in jeckyl-s3 felt just as easy to slap together as octopress.

While browsing the jekyll-s3 repo, I found out that the project moved here. So I redid my octopress setup from scratch – which took < 5 min anyways (^_^). Upgrade impressions & comparisons after the break.

Luckily, Robert Brewitz’ tutorial was still mostly valid. So the config on _config.yml and s3 config did not need re-configuration. Huge time saver. Where the tutorial started to fall short where parts calling s3-jeckyl (obviously). The s3_website command is a bit different from jeckyl-s3, but there’s sufficient info in the README.md for you to figure it out.

Was it worth the upgrade?

Yes. Apart from more documentation, & logical commands, s3_website has also included (or, at least, made more apparent) additional features (routing, ). Overall, in the 7 months’ time that Robert Brewitz blogged about s3-jeckyl, the plugin/gem/watevs has evolved much more; into a well-packaged product.

Takeways

1. Don’t suck at s3 bucket nomenclature.

   The only reason why I had as much trouble configuring jeckyl-s3 in the first place was because I was so stubborn in my desired routing. Don’t be stubborn. Follow the damn tute and be merry. ‘Nuff said.

2. Kinda wish I read a tutorial like this prior. (read: dd)

3. Add _site to .gitignore.

   Do this for the same reason why public is in .gitignore – it’s generated markup, typically not intended to be edited.

4. Changing destination in _config.yml will break rake preview

   This was fun… it took me months to realize this. I’m a noob at ruby. So now i keep destination stored like below and toggle the comment when pushing. Brilliant! pats self on back
   

...
destination: public   # default; rake preview
# destination: _site  # s3_website push
...

Welp, I hope this serves you well in your development of a slick deployment process. This was a good icebreaker exercise to get acquainted with octopress & jeckyl. I’ve been cruising on this high of slick tweaking and have been doing some work in the asides. But more on that later.

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