Unicode support for Octopress

:: IT

Well, it seems Octopress/Jekyll would like to have a locale set for UTF–8 support. I followed this (text in German) hint and now my Dockerfile looks like this:

# dockerfile for octopress

FROM ubuntu:14.04
MAINTAINER krrrcks <krrrcks@krrrcks.net>
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND noninteractive

RUN apt-get update; \
  apt-get -q -y upgrade
RUN /usr/sbin/locale-gen en_US.UTF-8; \
  update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
RUN apt-get -q -y install git curl; \
  apt-get clean
RUN git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git /opt/octopress
RUN curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby
ENV HOME /root
RUN echo "export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8" >> /root/.bashrc
RUN echo "export LANG=en_US.UTF-8" >> /root/.bashrc
RUN echo "source /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm" >> /root/.bashrc; 
RUN /bin/bash -l -c "source /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm; \
  rvm install 1.9.3; \
  rvm use 1.9.3; \
  rvm rubygems latest; \
  cd /opt/octopress; \
  gem install bundler; \
  bundle install; \
  rake install" 
RUN echo "rvm use 1.9.3" >> /root/.bashrc

WORKDIR /opt/octopress
EXPOSE 4000
CMD ["/bin/bash"] 

After playing around with Docker and Octopress I put the whole /opt/octopress folder on my host machine and then restarted the image with the -v flag. Therefore I can edit the files on my host machine with my favorite editor and use the container only for producing the HTML files, for preview and for publishing.

The rake preview is a neat feature because the server always looks for changed files and produces the HTML files on the fly. That means I can edit the files in my editor and could see the resulting pages in a browser nearly the same time.