---
layout: page
title: Configuring Octopress
date: July 19 2011
sidebar: false
comments: false
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---

[« Previous, Deploying Octopress](/docs/deploy)

I've tried to keep configuring Octopress fairly simple and Octopress keeps most configurations in two places, the `Rakefile` and the `_config.yml`.
Here's a list of files for configuring Octopress.

    _config.yml       # Main config (Jekyll's settings)
    Rakefile          # Configs for deployment
    config.rb         # Compass config
    config.ru         # Rack config

Configurations in the `Rakefile` are mostly related to deployment and you probably won't have to touch them unless you're using rsync.

## Blog Configuration

In the `_config.yml` there are three sections for configuring your Octopress Blog.

### Main Configs

- **url** - Your blog's full published url. This lets Octopress automatically rewrite relative urls to absolute urls for the RSS feed.
- **title** - Your blog's title is used in the header and title tag for your pages.
- **subtitle** - A further description for your blog. This appears beneath the Main header.
- **author** - Your name (for RSS, Copyright, and metadata) If this is a multi-author blog, you can set author in the yaml front matter of each blog post instead.
- **simple_search** - Queries entered in the search form, are constructed as a site search query eg. `search phrase site:yoursite.com`. Here you can set the search engine it uses (defaults to Google).
- **subscribe_rss** - Enter a url for your blog's RSS feed Defaults to `/atom.xml` an ATOM feed generated by Octopress
- **subscribe_email** - Enter a url for your blog's email subscription link (if you have one). Octopress does not provide this.
- **email** - (Optional) fills in the email property of the RSS feed.

### Jekyll & Plugins
If you're not familiar with Jekyll, you should probably have a look at the [configuration docs](https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Configuration)

- **root** - Leave this blank unless you're deploying to a subdirectory. For more info see [Deploying Octopress](/setup/deploy/)
- **port** - Specify a port for Jekyll's built in webbrick server.
- **permalink** - See [Jekyll's permalink docs](https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Permalinks) if you want to change the way permalinks are written for your blog posts.
- **source** - The source directory for your blog, no need to change this.
- **destination** - The folder where the generated blog files will be written.
- **plugins** - The plugins directory.
- **markdown** - Choose your Markdown processor (rdiscount or kramdown).
- **pygments** - Enable or disable pygments syntax highlighting.
- **paginate** - Set the number of posts per page in your blog index.
- **recent_posts** - Set the number of recent posts to appear in the sidebar section.

### 3rd Party Settings
These third party integrations are already set up for you. Simply fill in the configurations and they'll be added to your site.

- **Twitter** - Setup a sidebar twitter feed, follow button, and tweet button (for sharing posts and pages).
- **Google Plus One** - Setup sharing for posts and pages on Google's plus one network.
- **Pinboard** - Share your recent Pinboard bookmarks in the sidebar.
- **Delicious** - Share your recent Delicious bookmarks in the sidebar.
- **Disqus Comments** - Add your disqus short name to enable disqus comments on your site.
- **Google Analytics** - Add your tracking id to enable Google Analytics tracking for your site.

[Next, Blogging With Octopress »](/docs/blogging)