Fixing Octopress Rake Error

Octopress is a fantastic blogging platform and as I documented in a recent post, converting this site from Wordpress to Octopress was a smashing success. However, I did run into a minor hitch and thought it might be helpful to document the fix.

Today I started work on migrating another website over to Octopress and I ran into a problem with rake. Interestingly enough, I encountered this problem previously but didn’t document the solution. Since this is my second time seeing this error, I thought it might be helpful to document both the error and how I resolved it.

As documented on the Octopress site I got started with this new site by first cloning the Octopress git repository, installing any dependencies and then proceeding with the default theme installation. This is where I encountered the rake error:

$ rake install
rake aborted!
You have already activated rake 0.9.2.2, but your Gemfile requires rake 0.9.2. Using bundle exec may solve this.

The Gemfile requires rake 0.9.2 but I actually have a slightly newer version of rake installed. So, the solution is to let Bundler know that a newer version of rake is acceptable. To do so, I opened the Gemfile in the root directory of my Octopress site and updated the line for rake as follows:

gem 'rake', '>= 0.9.2'

I then saved the file and ran bundle update on the command line:

$ bundle update

What this does is update the Gemfile.lock file so that Bundler will accept any version of rake greater than or equal to 0.9.2.

I was then able to run rake install and have the installation execute successfully:

$ rake install
## Copying classic theme into ./source and ./sass
mkdir -p source
cp -r .themes/classic/source/. source
mkdir -p sass
cp -r .themes/classic/sass/. sass
mkdir -p source/_posts
mkdir -p public

I hope this solution helps someone. If anyone knows of a better way to fix the error, please let me know.