Nerd Food: Batch exports using latest org mode

I recently hit an annoying problem with org-mode: batch exports of gnuplot where failing with a mysterious error (full details here). To make a long story short, I was told to upgrade to latest org-mode from git. I followed the instructions on the brilliant org-mode FAQ and got there in no time.

But then it hit me, I needed to provided support for latest org mode in batch mode too! I tend to use default emacs settings in batch mode - well, lets put it this way, I never needed anything else - so I wasn't too sure how to do this. Last thing you need is your batch mode taking 1 minute to bootstrap because its running your full .emacs initialisation. And lord knows cunene ain't getting any smaller.

So after some fumbling I hacked myself a quick export.el that bootstraps a minimal latest org-mode:

(setq dotfiles-dir "~/.emacs.d/lisp")

(setq kill-buffer-query-functions

(remove 'process-kill-buffer-query-function

kill-buffer-query-functions))

(add-to-list 'load-path (concat dotfiles-dir "/other/gnuplot-mode"))

(add-to-list 'load-path (concat dotfiles-dir "/other/org-mode"))

(load-file (concat dotfiles-dir "/other/org-mode/lisp/org-install.el"))

(org-babel-do-load-languages

'org-babel-load-languages

'((emacs-lisp . t)

(sh . t)

(gnuplot . t)

(R . t)))

(setq org-confirm-babel-evaluate nil)

(require 'org-install)

(require 'org)

You may notice the setq kill-buffer-query-functions bit. This was to stop a really annoying message coming from gnuplot:

Buffer "*gnuplot-version*" has a running process; kill it? (yes or no)

Googling didn't reveal any direct solutions to the problem, which is a bit worrying; I wonder if I'm getting this because I'm running latest gnuplot mode. At any rate, I managed to knocked up this hack based on some other process related problem and it made the problem go away. The full incantation for emacs is:

$ /usr/bin/emacs --batch --no-site-file --directory ${org_path}/lisp/ \

--directory ${org_path}/contrib/lisp/ \

--load export.el --visit ${target} --eval '(org-export-as-html-batch)'

Replacing ${org_path} with the path to your git clone of org mode and ${target} with the org file you want to generate HTML for.