I have two workstations. The first is a custom built desktop that runs Windows (more on this later, hopefully). The second is an Asus laptop that primarily runs Linux.
I recently moved my sites over to Jekyll. I host them locally in a Dropbox directory, then push them to s3.
On Windows, I use jekyll-s3 to do the push. It’s convenient and works well. Just run gem install jekyll-s3 and then to push you run jekyll-s3 (the first time you do this, it walks you through configuration).
On Ubuntu, I couldn’t get the jekyll-s3 gem to install. So I use s3cmd. Installing was straightforward, just run:
sudo apt-get install s3cmd
But configuring s3cmd I ran into a stupid roadblock: my Secret Access Key contains some I and l characters, which look exactly the same in my browser. I tried to configure my s3cmd in the terminal by guessing which were “L"s and which were “I"s, never correctly, before I finally realized I could cut and paste them out of the browser and into a text editor that would make the difference obvious. Why it took me that long to realize I don’t know, but it worked like a charm once it did.
For the encryption and other default config details, I followed the basic config setup for s3cmd using this tutorial here.
Once it was configured, I saved the following as create-md.sh in the root folder for all my sites:
#!/bin/bash
cd /path/to/mysite.com
jekyll --server
I also saved the following as push-md.sh in the root folder for all my sites:
#!/bin/bash
cd /path/to/mysite.com
s3cmd put --delete-removed _site/ s3://mydomain.com
echo 's3cmd has been processed'
Ideally I’d like to combine the scripts (or use a git hook), but I haven’t found a way to programmaticaly shut down jekyll once it’s regenerated the site. Doing it this way also lets me check the changes on a local server first.
I then set an alias for each .sh file, so that all I have to do is open terminal and type create-md, check the site on a browser, and then push-md to push my site to s3.
NB: A good list of all the options for the s3cmd commands is here.