Some gotchas when installing Octopress on Ubuntu

Here are some quick notes I took while trying to install the Octopress blog engine on a box running Ubuntu 12.04. I tried following the official instructions and I chose the RVM method. The first gotcha is that you have to have the development tools (compilers, linkers etc) installed already. So you need to run:

# apt-get install build-essential


Then I ran the recommended commands in order to install rvm and rubygems:

# curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby
# source /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm
# rvm install 1.9.3
# rvm use 1.9.3
# rvm rubygems latest


I then installed git and grabbed the octopress source code:
 
# apt-get install git
# git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress
# cd octopress/

When trying to install bundler, I got this error:

# gem install bundler

ERROR:  Loading command: install (LoadError)
   cannot load such file -- zlib
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (NameError)
   uninitialized constant Gem::Commands::InstallCommand

Googling around, I found this answer on Stack Overflow which talked about the same error. The solution was to install the zlib1g-dev package, then reinstall rvm so it's aware of zlib, then install bundler.

# apt-get install  zlib1g-dev
# rvm reinstall 1.9.3
# gem install bundler

At this point I was able to continue the installation by running these commands (in the octopress source top directory):

# bundle install
# rake install

That's about it about installing Octopress. I still have to figure out how to front Octopress with nginx, and how to actually start using it.