Installing Octopress on Windows

When I had to decide what blog publisher to use, I decided to go for Octopress, as it generates static files, making the blog faster and safer; however, installing it on Windows was not as straightforward as it could be, so this post details what I had to do.

In the Initial setup section of the Octopress documentation, the first thing they ask you to do is to install Ruby; unfortunately, both RVM and rbenv don’t seem to work on Windows. So, after searching around I found a very easy installer, which can be downloaded here.

I downloaded both “Ruby 1.9.2-p290” and “DevKit-tdm-32-4.5.2-20111229-1559-sfx.exe”; the second is required by Octopress, as Octopress installation will throw a “Error installing RedCloth” message if trying to install without the DevKit.

The Ruby installer is very straightforward to install; I recommend toggling the option to put Ruby in the PATH automatically; the DevKit file is trickier, but just follow the instructions.

The rest of steps are unchanged, so follow them and you’ll have it running in no time.

Now, my initial impressions about it.

  • It’s easy to create new posts, but I need to get used to the syntax; it uses a language called Markdown.
  • Be careful with Unicode characters it may give encoding errors; use HTML entities when possible.
  • I really like the theme; it’s very elegant and comfortable to read.