How to Pelican

Install on Ubuntu

Installing Python tools

sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper

vi ~/.bashrc
# Virtualenvwrapper
export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

source ~/.bashrc
mkvirtualenv blog
workon blog

# And to leave:
deactivate

Installing Pelican

sudo pip install pelican
sudo pip install markdown

Upgrading

pip install --upgrade pelican
pip install --upgrade markdown

Creating a blog on GitHub Pages

Steps to publish a post

In parenthesis is the git branch we are working on:

(master) Create the post in rst or md (rst and md are abbreviations for resTructuredText and markdown)
(master) Generate the HTML
(master) Check the post in a local server
(master) We could delete the output but dones't matter if we don't because git will ignore with our gitignore file
(gh-pages) Merge master branch
(gh-pages) Generate the HTML
(gh-pages) push all the files (normally all the new HTML)
(master) push all the files (normally only one post)

Create git repository

Clone git repository

git clone [email protected]:user/blog.git
cd ./blog

Create in the root folder a file named .gitignore

vi .gitignore

#Custom
local_settings.py
output

#Python
*.py[cod]

# C extensions
*.so

# Packages
*.egg
*.egg-info
dist
build
eggs
parts
bin
var
sdist
develop-eggs
.installed.cfg
lib
lib64

# Installer logs
pip-log.txt

# Unit test / coverage reports
.coverage
.tox
nosetests.xml

# Translations
*.mo

# Mr Developer
.mr.developer.cfg
.project
.pydevproject

Create a Pelican settings file

Now we will create a pelican settings file called local_settings.py, this file will not be commited to the git repo, maybe has personal data. But we will upload a blank template named settings.py, so we create also this one, that has the same variables as local_settings.py but without the vars data. Edit the data you need (You can store the local_settings.py data in a private gist manually):

wget -O settings.py https://raw.github.com/getpelican/pelican/master/samples/pelican.conf.py
cp settings.py local_settings.py

To generate the static html we use:

pelican -s ./local_settings.py

This will take all the settings and apply, but if we want to override some settings we could do. For example to specify the ouput we use -o:

pelican -s ./local_settings.py -o /tmp/myBlog

Creating a post

mkdir -p ./posts/2013/07
vi welcome-all.md

Title: Welcome All
Slug: welcome-all
Date: 2013-07-22 19:19
Category: Python
Tags: pelican, publishing
Author: Josef Jezek
Summary: Short version for index and feeds

# Welcome All

This is the content of my blog post.

zunction/how-to-use-pelican.md