An interesting turn of events… While I was working on cleaning up my “Backing Up Hexo Blog Source To Github Repo” blog post, my power went out! I was trying to figure out how I could get internet working on my laptop without power. I revisited FoxFi/Pdanet and discovered that FoxFi works fine with my locked down AT&T LG V10! I decided to pay for the pro-version, since I do love having LTE on my old 2010 laptop.
I was hesitant to tinker around with Hexo, because I was worried about getting merge conflicts when my power comes back on. Well, I decided to just create a new blog post. I can work on the github post when power comes on.
Update
As of 9:07PM PST the power has been restored! I went ahead and pulled, commited, and pushed the changes on my desktop. No conflicts came up and I’m happily blogging on both my desktop and laptop!
I have ran into a few issues with having hexo on my desktop and laptop. One thing to note is that Hexo’s environment (aka the hexo blog folder) containes a few dependencies and files that could conflict between the two environments. First thing to note is _config.yml. When creating a new hexo blog on your second machine, hexo init will generate a default _config.yml. It’s important to copy your github source _config.yml to your desktop and then overwrite it in your hexo folder. Secondly, add package.json to .gitignore before your first push to github repo. The two environments will clash with merging conflicts if this file is placed there. -from laptop
Since documentation doesn’t really cover this, I thought I’d just make note of this. If you want to prevent your Hexo blog for disappearing off the face of the planet, don’t keep it in one place. In my case, I’ve had Octopress blogs die because my Octopress source went MIA when my SSD died. Since I also spend most my time on my desktop, having Hexo only on my laptop would be inconveniant. Time to break things.
Before we start, it’s assumed that you already have git, node.js, and hexo setup on your main computer. You will notice me refer to my laptop and desktop throughout this article. My laptop is the first hexo environment I setup. I want to be able to make edits to my blog on my desktop while I’m working or while I’m out at the coffee shop.
git init
1
2
$ cd ~/github/kaichi.github.io
$ git init
Open .gitignore in your favorite editor. We need to make sure to add package.json to this list so that we can easily work on our hexo source on other computers. Failing to do this will cause merging conflicts and both hexo environments/dependencies to be confused.
.gitignore + package.json
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
.DS_Store
Thumbs.db
db.json
*.log
node_modules/
public/
.deploy*/
package.json
commit and push
Finally, we can add/commit and add the remote origin. You’ll want to create an empty Github repository for before proceeding.
1
2
3
4
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "putting hexo blog source on github"
Basically what you’ll want to do is have a repository for your hexo deployment and one for your source. Atleast this way, if I need to clone the source repository to my desktop I can grab it on the fly. Always commit!
I’ve ran into issues when cloning my source to my desktop. I wasn’t sure how this would go about since npm places dependencies inside the hexo blog folder. I ran into a few road blocks, but I believe this is how to go about it.
After cloning your hexo blog source, cut _config.yml and paste it to your desktop. We will need this later. Backup package.json if you want, it will get overwritten. You will need to install your dependencies in the next few steps to setup the hexo environment.
Hexo Init & Install Hexo Deployer Git
Assuming you already have node.js and hexo installed on your second machine (in my case, my desktop) proceed to initiate hexo over your cloned source.
1
2
$ cd c:\github\
$ hexo init kaichi.github.io-source
After that’s said and done, go to your desktop and copy _config.yml and paste it over the default one init placed in your environment.
Next let’s get the deployer installed.
1
$ hexo install hexo-deployer-git --save
Don’t forget about the –save flag, I completely derped out and couldn’t deploy my blog and noticed it wasn’t even installed.
final deployment testing
Now you should be able to generate and deploy your hexo blog. Keep in mind, I am using Git Shell specifically because I don’t want to juggle and mess with ssh keys.
1
2
$ hexo generate
$ hexo deploy
Everything should deploy fine, check your github page to see if it’s broken. It might take a second to update. Worse comes to worse, it’s broken and you can just redeploy from your first workstation, or in my case my laptop. Now it’s time to see if I can push my local source and get this writeup to update on my laptop without exploding…
Side Notes
Things are exploding… putting package.json in .gitignore… -update from laptop
I keep running into issues with package.json… First I noticed that package.json has a few conflicts between the two environments with versions / dependancies. I removed it from the repo and added it to .gitignore. Now when I pulled from laptop and desktop it would delete the local package.json. Perhaps from the very beginning I should have added package.json to the .gitignore folder.
Ive revisted Octopress on and off the past year in hopes to actually get a nice github pages blog going. Everytime Im faced with a few difficult challenges: SSD fails and losing the source, not having source branch on github (lack of guidance for this in the documentation), confusing differences between Octopress 2.0, 3.0, and Jekyll. Yesterday it seems that I kept running into more and more issues with Octopress 2.0 - it seems like everything I was doing had dependency errors. I would go and resolve the errors and new errors would surface. I gave up on Octopress 2 to try Octopress 3.0. Again, lack of documentation made it difficult to get rolling. No theme, no guidance to get the theme going, I started hacking together Jekyll themes to work on Octopress 3. The one thing I wanted to try kept giving me errors on octopress generate.
Finally after digging through the issues tracker I found a user that felt just as frustrated as myself, he/she decided to go with Hexo blogging framework. I check out their profile and was impressed with their github pages blog. I managed to get hexo going in 15 minutes with an interesting theme. This is the first time I’ve ever played with Node.js - and Im on Windows! Horray!
Now that this is rolling, Ill try to put the source onto my desktop (as oppose to my laptop) and go through the motions of breaking it on git.
Welcome to Hexo! This is your very first post. Check documentation for more info. If you get any problems when using Hexo, you can find the answer in troubleshooting or you can ask me on GitHub.
