Transfer Hexo Blog to New Device

Programming

I established this personal blog with GitHub pages and Hexo on my Windows PC. Currently, I want to transfer from PC to MacOS. This article explains the whole process of transferring.

Basic Thought

The basic thought of the process is using the GitHub branch to implement the cross-platform synchronization. Keep the static webpage file in the original master branch and create a new branch ‘hexo’ to backup all the source code of the Hexo blog.

When these are all set, clone the hexo branch repo into a new device and push the new updates to GitHub every time renewing the blog contents. The static web page would be generated and deployed in master branch by hexo g -d

Specific steps are shown as follows:

Create a new branch

  • git clone to clone your existing hexo blog repository.
  • git checkout -b hexo create a new ‘hexo’ branch
  • Delete all the files in this repo (especially in themes/) folder except ‘.git’ folder.
  • Copy the entire original hexo blog folder from your old device to the current path.
  • Delete all the old ‘.git’ related folders.
  • git add . git commit -m "init hexo blog src files" git push origin hexo:hexo push to the new branch on GitHub

Install Hexo on the new device

  • Install node.js and git first. Use the stable version node but not the latest version.
  • npm install hexo --save install Hexo
  • npm install hexo-deployer-git --save install git deployer plugin

Deploy Blog

  • add .gitignore in hexo branch
  • add .deploy_git/* public/* in .gitigonre
  • hexo clean clean the old public static webpages
  • hexo g -d generate and deploy new static webpages.

Tips of Hexo CLI

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hexo n "My blog" == hexo new "My blog" #New article
hexo g == hexo generate#Generate
hexo s == hexo server # start service preview
hexo d == hexo deploy#deploy