Octopress auto building the site locally for one blog post

Setting up a blog post using Octopress involves writing up your Markdown content, building the site, and previewing it.

This can be time-consuming when writing posts, having to run several commands repeatedly. Here’s a few lines you can put into a bash script and run once each time:

#!/bin/bash

PATHTOLATEST=`ls -t source/_posts | head -1`;
echo $PATHTOLATEST
bundle exec rake isolate[$PATHTOLATEST];
bundle exec rake generate;
bundle exec rake preview;

1. The PATHTOLATEST variable finds the latest post
2. echo the variable for debugging purposes
3. rake isolate instructs octopress to build the site with only the latest blog post
4. rake generate builds the site
5. rake preview initialises the web server

From then you can make changes to your post, and the site will be automatically regenerated. This uses a file watcher so it’s helpful to keep the terminal open to watch for it building, or having errors