Migrating from FunnelWeb to Pretzel - Part 1

After now almost 2.5 years, I start blogging again. But with the old FunnelWeb system it would'nt be much fun. It was buggy and very hard to write in the browser. So i used MarkdownPad to write my posts, copy them into the blogengine, and fixed syntax erros to get the code highlighting working. What a mess!

So i decided to migrate to a more code and commandline centric engine: Pretzel.

Getting started

According to the documentation is is really simple to get going.

Using Chocolatey its a few keystrokes away.

Install Chocolatey if you don't have it allready. Fire up a admin commandpromt.

For the commandline:

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

Or using Powershell

iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Next we install pretzel, initialize git and install the default template:

choco install pretzel -y
  
mkdir myNewBlog
cd myNewBlog

git init

pretzel create

This will create the following output:

C:\tmp>mkdir myNewBlog

C:\tmp>cd myNewBlog

C:\tmp\myNewBlog>git init
Initialized empty Git repository in C:/tmp/myNewBlog/.git/

C:\tmp\myNewBlog>pretzel create
starting pretzel...
create - configure a new site
Using Liquid Engine
Pretzel site template has been created

C:\tmp\myNewBlog>

Taste it!

pretzel taste

This will fire up a browser and start looking for all your html and md files in the blog, and regenerate the when files change.

Nice, we are good to go. Stop tasting by hitting Q

Lets look in the blog directory by explorer .

Everything in this directory except _site should go under versioncontrol.

Lets start by getting a .gitignore file. I used the Jekyll one because Pretzel is a port of Jekyll written in C#

powershell
Invoke-WebRequest https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/gitignore/master/Jekyll.gitignore -OutFile ".gitignore"
exit

Let's look at git:

git status

On branch master

Initial commit

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

        .gitignore
        _config.yml
        _includes/
        _layouts/
        _posts/
        about.md
        atom.xml
        css/
        img/
        index.html
        rss.xml
        sitemap.xml

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

Okay, lets check this in what we have so far.

git add .
git commit -m "Pretzel blog is running"

Now we need to get sure we don't have files in our _site directory that are not needed

pretzel bake --cleantarget
explorer .\_site

Open _config.yml and add a few lines we need in future blog posts.

pretzel:
    engine: liquid

exclude:
  - publish.ps1
  - build.cake
  - build.ps1
  - tools\
  - .vscode\
  - .git\
  - .gitignore
  - add-tag.cmd

Lets checkin this.

git add .
git commit -m "Pretzel now excludes tools we need in the future"

Alright! That was easy.

The next time we look how we build the blog in Visual-Studio-Team-Services (former VSO, Visual-Studio-Online, now VSTS).

The source-code in available on github i will provide a seperate branch for every post. Master contains the most recent one.

Greetings Manuel