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page	Updating Octopress	2011-07-22 19:46	false	false

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In the open source world, version control generally takes care of staying current with the latest releases, but once you've begun to customize your code, merging in updates isn't always what you want. As a result I've come up with the following pattern for Octopress:

1. Plugins, configs, gemfiles, .themes, .gitignore and the Rakefile are all tracked for easy to updating and collaborating.

2. The install process copies layouts, pages, javascripts, and styles out of the .themes directory. Once you've installed a theme, none of the files under source or sass are in any repository except your own. This way you can change them to your liking without worrying about merging in updates and screwing up your changes.

When you pull down changes from the Octopress repository, the latest layouts, pages, javascripts and styles are merged into your .themes directory. To update your site, you must manually merge in the new files. Before you do a spit-take, I came up with something to help out with this.

Updating Sass

If you've pulled in changes and you want to update your /sass directory, run this.

rake update_style

This task will:

1. Move /sass to /sass.old
2. Copy .themes/classic/sass to /sass
3. Replace /sass/custom/ with /sass.old/custom/

This way if you keep your theme changes in /sass/custom you'll be able to upgrade your stylesheets without losing any of your work. If you made changes elsewhere, you can copy them back them from /sass.old. After you have the update in place, you can remove the /sass.old directory.

Updating Source

If you've pulled in changes and you want to update your /source directory, run this.

rake update_source

This task will:

1. Move /source to /source.old
2. Copy .themes/classic/source to /source
3. Copy back everything in /source.old (cp -rn - without replacing )
4. Replace /source/_includes/navigation.html with /source.old/_includes/navigation.html (because it commonly has changes).

This way all of the files you've added, eg. _posts, about.html etc. will be preserved while all files tracked by Octopress (except for the navigation partial) will be updated. If you made changes elsewhere, you can copy them back them from /source.old. After you have the update in place, you can remove the /source.old directory.

That's It?

Yep. I figured this is the simplest thing that could possibly work. I don't like the idea of having blog files change if someone wants to update their plugins, and I haven't yet figured out a better way. If you have a better idea, I'd love some help improving this.

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