In order to sync my nanoc site to my provider’s server, I have installed sitecopy. Sitecopy requires one of the ports packages. I chose fink, but Darwinports should also work I guess.

First, I downloaded the Xcode and iOS developer software from Apple (registration required as an Apple developer, but free). This installed without issue.

Then, I followed the instructions on the Fink website. The instructions are quite clear I think. I tried to fill in as many local servers as possible while running ./bootstrap. It would be a shame to transfer everything over the Atlantic cables, right?

What doe surprise me, is that many packages were installed, which I actually already have, many already built into OS X. One that jumped out to me, was python. I can only assume that this is done in order to have all libraries in control of Fink. I just really hope having some programs around twice, does not cause conflicts. fingers crossed…

Now for the real stuff

Once sitecopy was running, it actually ran very quickly. I copied an example rakefile From here and followed the directory structure suggested by it:

nanoc/
  site/
    content/
    layouts/
    sitecopy/
      sitecopyrc

So, that is: no dotfiles, all files visible to the filesystem. Of course, this is not the default for sitecopy, so we specify the sitecopy rc file locations in the rakefile.

Then, I created the sitecopyrc as follows:

site my.pretty.name
server ftp.server.url
remote /
local ~/nanoc/pragtich/trunk/output/
username myFTPusernae
password thepassword
protocol ftp

Where the folder after local is the nanoc output folder.

I then used the initialization from the example rakefile: sitecopy -r sitecopy/sitecopyrc -p sitecopy -i my.pretty.name And crated a ‘compile and upload’ rake addition to the Rakefile:

desc "compile and upload."
task :co do
  system 'nanoc co && sitecopy  -r sitecopy/sitecopyrc -p sitecopy -u my.pretty.name'
end

So now, each time I edit something in my page, I only have to go…

rake co

…and the entire thing is recompiled and synchronized to the server.

Mission accomplished!

Update

When I started using git, I needed to add a line to the sitecopyrc. I added several of the disturbing dotfiles (which my server was not allowing me to upload) to the exclude list. The sitecopy/sitecopyrc now looks something like:

site my.pretty.name
server ftp.server.url
remote /
local ~/nanoc/pragtich/output/
username myFTPusernae
password thepassword
protocol ftp
exclude .DS_Store
exclude .git

This saves a lot of error messages, which eventually led to a failing sitecopy.