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Rake Publish

Rake Publish

June 23, 2014

Note

2025 Update. This blog is no longer Octoblog, but the content is still valid.

Octoblog (the engine behind this blog) uses Jekyll. As such, it also supports the publish flag. I a previous post I detailed how I added this feature back to Octopress. Here I will show you a little rake task to easily publish an unpublished post.

Requirements

For a post to be published I wanted a few things to happen:

  1. published: true was set in the YAML front-matter
  2. date: <todays date> was set in the YAML front-matter
  3. The file was moved to today.

Here is what I came up with for my Rakefile.

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desc "Publishes an unpublished entry by changing its name, updating its internal timestamp, and setting published: true"
task :publish, :pattern do |t, args|
  require 'tempfile'
  require 'fileutils'

  files = Dir[File.join(source_dir,posts_dir,args[:pattern])]
  raise "No files found matching pattern" if files.size == 0
  raise "Too many files match pattern" if files.size > 1

  name_time = Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
  file_time = Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M')

  file = files.first
  name = File.basename file
  new_name = name.gsub(/\\\\d+-\\\\d+-\\\\d+/,name_time)
  w        = Tempfile.new('publish')

  File.open file do |f|
    scan = false
    f.readlines.each do |line|
      # limit scanning to the YAML front matter
      scan = !scan if line == "---\\\\n"
      unless scan
        w.write line
        next
      end

      line.gsub!(/published.*/,"published: true")
      line.gsub!(/date.*/, "date: #{file_time}")

      w.write line
    end
  end
  w.close

  FileUtils.rm file
  FileUtils.mv w.path, File.join(source_dir,posts_dir,new_name)
end
  • Line 6: I take a argument and get a list of files matching the pattern
  • Line 7 & 8: I found it was too easy to screw up a pattern and publish too few or too many posts. For that reason I am explicit about the failure.
  • Line 15: Calculates its name for today.
  • Line 16 & 37: Generate a temp file to write to. I found that bad things happened if you published a post that you wrote the same day. Solution was to write to a temp file and then move the temp file later.
  • Line 19 && 22: An inelegant solution to isolating scanning to only the YAML front-matter.
  • Line 28 & 29: Update the YAML front-matter.
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