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Getting Started with Nitrous.io and Jekyll

by Grant McLendon

29 Jan 2014

Getting started with Nitrous

First thing, go the Nitrous.io and log in using Github.

Now got to Boxes and create a box. The type doesn't really matter, but Django is best for us right now.

Don't worry, you don't need to pay for more N2O, the free 155 is more than enough to do everything we need to do for our class.

Now your box is running you can click on it and click IDE.

Now you should be looking at a black screen with several different sub-windows in it.

In front of you is a full-fledge linux/unix terminal with all the power therein. This is where we will be spending the rest of the semester.

Getting the Blog Going

Now we need to set up git so we can talk to Github

If you haven't done this already, do the following:

git config --global user.email "your@email.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global core.editor nano
git config --global color.ui true

Now we can get our fork of the SilsHack Site:

git clone https://github.com/[githubusername]/spring2014.git 

If we want to render it though, we need to install Jekyll

gem install github-pages

And wait for it to finish.

Now if you Change Directory (cd) to the spring 2014 directory we can test to see that the site works properly

cd spring2014
jekyll serve

Now, go to Preview -> Port 4000 and add /spring2014/ to the end of the URL.

Pushing changes back up

Now, suppose you've made some changes to the site and want to push them up to your github repo so you can open a pull request to get it into the Class Site

We need to check and see what's up in our local git repository, and what files we need to add by running

 git status

Next, we need to make a commit. Do the following in the spring2014 directory

 git add _posts/date-newpost.md #This makes sure Git knows the post exists
 git commit -m "A Commit Message, be descriptive"
 git push origin gh-pages

And now, if you check your Github and you should see the changes you made.

Grant is a first year MSIS student. He's from Chapel Hil and like playing with new technologies and getting way in over his head. Find Grant McLendon on Twitter, Github, and on the web.
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