Procrastination…I admit that I was back to my sweet home last year to be exact at midnight December 24, 2019 after 4+ months adventure in South America. Then I was on real do-nothing vacation first for couple of days followed by researching and planning my next Africa trip. Finally, I am back to update my blog…still before I can do that, I need to move the work to my desktop. Hopefully, this works. Let’s check out the first push from the desk top!

The Need for Working on Multiple PCs

You may say I am listing the excuses for not updating my blog in real-time during my travel. However, it was really difficult to find time between all the extreme hiking trails, planning for my next stop, a decent table to put my laptop and most important WIFI connections many times. Even if all the above conditions were met, I was just exhausted but to lay on my bed to have some rests…

Now I am back to home for a short break. Before my next adventure to Africa, I am determined to complete my travel trajectories in South America. Yes, step one is to find myself a better working environment which is a good computer desk with large monitor and a decent hard disk storage space! Dear friend, one suggestion, do be allured by cheaper price for a small SDD drive, you may pay higher price later. I was stupid for that to order my ultra book with only 128G several years ago. What I was thinking about?! What’s worse is the monster Windows 10, it has system update all the time and requires 10+ G for that?! Enough! I am moving to my desktop for Hexo blog.

Implementation

Long story in short, I prepared my desktop so that I can publish Hexo blog from my desktop.

Step 1: Add Branch to Your Blog Repository

On the local PC, in my case, my Dell laptop, go to the blog folder and Git Bash there and do the following:

# Blog Initialization
$ git init  
# Add new branch (name: backup)
$ git checkout -b backup  
# add files in the working directory to the staging area
$ git add .  
# commit your files
$ git commit -m "commit message"  
# add remote repository
$ git remote set-url https://github.com/yourname/yourname.github.io.git
# push the local to remote
$ git push origin backup

Step 2: Prepare New PC

On the new computer, i.e. my desktop do the following:

2.1 Install Git

2.2 Install Nodejs

2.3 Prepare the Blog

Create a new folder for hexoBlog
Git Bash and do the following:

# clone hexo blog branch to this working folder
$ git clone -b backup https://github.com/yourname/yourname.github.io.git
# enter yourname.github.io folder
$ cd yourname.github.io
# install hexo
$ npm install hexo --save
# install hexo command mode
$ npm install hexo-cli -g
# install all dependencies (according to package.json, this will automatically install previously installed dependencies)
$ npm install

2.4 Add SSH Key

1 2	# Generate SSH key $ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "youremail@example.com"

Then go to the .ssh folder (default: C:\Users\yourUserName\.ssh), open “id_rsa.pub” and copy all the contents in this file.

Now go to Github.com and log in. Under ‘Settings’\‘SSH and GPG keys’ add the SSH key (the contents copied from id_rsa.pub)

2.5 Add Remote Repository

1	$ git remote set-url https://github.com/yourname/yourname.github.io.git

2.6 Add your theme

In this case, my theme is next(https://github.com/theme-next/hexo-theme-next)

1	$ git clone https://github.com/theme-next/hexo-theme-next themes/next

2.7 Test it out

1 2	$ hexo clean $ hexo g -d

2.8 Push anything new to the backup branch

1
2
3

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "commit-message"
$ git push origin backup

2.9 Update/Pull everything on every computer

1	$ git pull origin backup

The reference link is here:

https://liziczh.com/hexo-multimachine.html

Issues

As always, there are some issues every time I implement something here :{

Issue 1: git push failed

As listed in 2.8, I want to push my new posts to the repository branch, using git push origin backup, ended up with fatal error no repository found…

Reason: I am using SSH key

Solution: set-url differently

1	$ git remote set-url origin git@github.com:yourName/yourName.github.io.git

Issue 2: All custom theme lost

For some reasons, when I push local hexoBlog folder from my laptop, the themes folder was not pushed. That is why I need to install the theme again. However, I made several custom changes to this theme which were all lost…

Simple Solution: copy the entire themes/next folder to desktop.

Yes, there are several approaches to push the themes folder to the repository. I tried some but nothing worked. To save time, just do the stupid and quick way. Otherwise, I will never get to update the real travel blog…