Getting started ############### Installing Pelican ================== Pelican currently runs best on Python 2.7.x; earlier versions of Python are not supported. There is provisional support for Python 3.3, although there may be rough edges, particularly with regards to optional 3rd-party components. You can install Pelican via several different methods. The simplest is via `pip `_:: $ pip install pelican If you don't have ``pip`` installed, an alternative method is ``easy_install``:: $ easy_install pelican (Keep in mind that operating systems will often require you to prefix the above commands with ``sudo`` in order to install Pelican system-wide.) While the above is the simplest method, the recommended approach is to create a virtual environment for Pelican via virtualenv_ before installing Pelican. Assuming you have virtualenv_ installed, you can then open a new terminal session and create a new virtual environment for Pelican:: $ virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/pelican $ cd ~/virtualenvs/pelican $ . bin/activate Once the virtual environment has been created and activated, Pelican can be be installed via ``pip install pelican`` as noted above. Alternatively, if you have the project source, you can install Pelican using the distutils method:: $ cd path-to-Pelican-source $ python setup.py install If you have Git installed and prefer to install the latest bleeding-edge version of Pelican rather than a stable release, use the following command:: $ pip install -e git+https://github.com/getpelican/pelican.git#egg=pelican If you plan on using Markdown as a markup format, you'll need to install the Markdown library as well:: $ pip install Markdown If you want to use AsciiDoc_ you need to install it from `source `_ or use your operating system's package manager. Basic usage ----------- Once Pelican is installed, you can use it to convert your Markdown or reST content into HTML via the ``pelican`` command, specifying the path to your content and (optionally) the path to your settings file:: $ pelican /path/to/your/content/ [-s path/to/your/settings.py] The above command will generate your site and save it in the ``output/`` folder, using the default theme to produce a simple site. The default theme consists of very simple HTML without styling and is provided so folks may use it as a basis for creating their own themes. You can also tell Pelican to watch for your modifications, instead of manually re-running it every time you want to see your changes. To enable this, run the ``pelican`` command with the ``-r`` or ``--autoreload`` option. Pelican has other command-line switches available. Have a look at the help to see all the options you can use:: $ pelican --help Continue reading below for more detail, and check out the Pelican wiki's `Tutorials `_ page for links to community-published tutorials. Viewing the generated files --------------------------- The files generated by Pelican are static files, so you don't actually need anything special to view them. You can either use your browser to open the files on your disk:: firefox output/index.html Or run a simple web server using Python:: cd output && python -m SimpleHTTPServer Upgrading --------- If you installed a stable Pelican release via ``pip`` or ``easy_install`` and wish to upgrade to the latest stable release, you can do so by adding ``--upgrade`` to the relevant command. For pip, that would be:: $ pip install --upgrade pelican If you installed Pelican via distutils or the bleeding-edge method, simply perform the same step to install the most recent version. Dependencies ------------ When Pelican is installed, the following dependent Python packages should be automatically installed without any action on your part: * `feedgenerator `_, to generate the Atom feeds * `jinja2 `_, for templating support * `pygments `_, for syntax highlighting * `docutils `_, for supporting reStructuredText as an input format * `pytz `_, for timezone definitions * `blinker `_, an object-to-object and broadcast signaling system * `unidecode `_, for ASCII transliterations of Unicode text * `six `_, for Python 2 and 3 compatibility utilities * `MarkupSafe `_, for a markup safe string implementation If you want the following optional packages, you will need to install them manually via ``pip``: * `markdown `_, for supporting Markdown as an input format * `typogrify `_, for typographical enhancements Kickstart your site =================== Once Pelican has been installed, you can create a skeleton project via the ``pelican-quickstart`` command, which begins by asking some questions about your site:: $ pelican-quickstart Once you finish answering all the questions, your project will consist of the following hierarchy (except for "pages", which you can optionally add yourself if you plan to create non-chronological content):: yourproject/ ├── content │   └── (pages) ├── output ├── develop_server.sh ├── fabfile.py ├── Makefile ├── pelicanconf.py # Main settings file └── publishconf.py # Settings to use when ready to publish The next step is to begin to adding content to the *content* folder that has been created for you. (See the **Writing content using Pelican** section below for more information about how to format your content.) Once you have written some content to generate, you can use the ``pelican`` command to generate your site, which will be placed in the output folder. Automation tools ================ While the ``pelican`` command is the canonical way to generate your site, automation tools can be used to streamline the generation and publication flow. One of the questions asked during the ``pelican-quickstart`` process described above pertains to whether you want to automate site generation and publication. If you answered "yes" to that question, a ``fabfile.py`` and ``Makefile`` will be generated in the root of your project. These files, pre-populated with certain information gleaned from other answers provided during the ``pelican-quickstart`` process, are meant as a starting point and should be customized to fit your particular needs and usage patterns. If you find one or both of these automation tools to be of limited utility, these files can deleted at any time and will not affect usage of the canonical ``pelican`` command. Following are automation tools that "wrap" the ``pelican`` command and can simplify the process of generating, previewing, and uploading your site. Fabric ------ The advantage of Fabric_ is that it is written in Python and thus can be used in a wide range of environments. The downside is that it must be installed separately. Use the following command to install Fabric, prefixing with ``sudo`` if your environment requires it:: $ pip install Fabric Take a moment to open the ``fabfile.py`` file that was generated in your project root. You will see a number of commands, any one of which can be renamed, removed, and/or customized to your liking. Using the out-of-the-box configuration, you can generate your site via:: $ fab build If you'd prefer to have Pelican automatically regenerate your site every time a change is detected (which is handy when testing locally), use the following command instead:: $ fab regenerate To serve the generated site so it can be previewed in your browser at http://localhost:8000/:: $ fab serve If during the ``pelican-quickstart`` process you answered "yes" when asked whether you want to upload your site via SSH, you can use the following command to publish your site via rsync over SSH:: $ fab publish These are just a few of the commands available by default, so feel free to explore ``fabfile.py`` and see what other commands are available. More importantly, don't hesitate to customize ``fabfile.py`` to suit your specific needs and preferences. Make ---- A ``Makefile`` is also automatically created for you when you say "yes" to the relevant question during the ``pelican-quickstart`` process. The advantage of this method is that the ``make`` command is built into most POSIX systems and thus doesn't require installing anything else in order to use it. The downside is that non-POSIX systems (e.g., Windows) do not include ``make``, and installing it on those systems can be a non-trivial task. If you want to use ``make`` to generate your site, run:: $ make html If you'd prefer to have Pelican automatically regenerate your site every time a change is detected (which is handy when testing locally), use the following command instead:: $ make regenerate To serve the generated site so it can be previewed in your browser at http://localhost:8000/:: $ make serve Normally you would need to run ``make regenerate`` and ``make serve`` in two separate terminal sessions, but you can run both at once via:: $ make devserver The above command will simultaneously run Pelican in regeneration mode as well as serve the output at http://localhost:8000. Once you are done testing your changes, you should stop the development server via:: $ ./develop_server.sh stop When you're ready to publish your site, you can upload it via the method(s) you chose during the ``pelican-quickstart`` questionnaire. For this example, we'll use rsync over ssh:: $ make rsync_upload That's it! Your site should now be live. Writing content using Pelican ============================= Articles and pages ------------------ Pelican considers "articles" to be chronological content, such as posts on a blog, and thus associated with a date. The idea behind "pages" is that they are usually not temporal in nature and are used for content that does not change very often (e.g., "About" or "Contact" pages). .. _internal_metadata: File metadata ------------- Pelican tries to be smart enough to get the information it needs from the file system (for instance, about the category of your articles), but some information you need to provide in the form of metadata inside your files. If you are writing your content in reStructuredText format, you can provide this metadata in text files via the following syntax (give your file the ``.rst`` extension):: My super title ############## :date: 2010-10-03 10:20 :tags: thats, awesome :category: yeah :slug: my-super-post :author: Alexis Metaireau :summary: Short version for index and feeds Pelican implements an extension to reStructuredText to enable support for the ``abbr`` HTML tag. To use it, write something like this in your post:: This will be turned into :abbr:`HTML (HyperText Markup Language)`. You can also use Markdown syntax (with a file ending in ``.md``, ``.markdown``, ``.mkd``, or ``.mdown``). Markdown generation requires that you first explicitly install the ``Markdown`` package, which can be done via ``pip install Markdown``. Metadata syntax for Markdown posts should follow this pattern:: Title: My super title Date: 2010-12-03 10:20 Category: Python Tags: pelican, publishing Slug: my-super-post Author: Alexis Metaireau Summary: Short version for index and feeds This is the content of my super blog post. Conventions for AsciiDoc_ posts, which should have an ``.asc`` extension, can be found on the AsciiDoc_ site. Pelican can also process HTML files ending in ``.html`` and ``.htm``. Pelican interprets the HTML in a very straightforward manner, reading metadata from ``meta`` tags, the title from the ``title`` tag, and the body out from the ``body`` tag:: My super title This is the content of my super blog post. With HTML, there is one simple exception to the standard metadata: ``tags`` can be specified either via the ``tags`` metadata, as is standard in Pelican, or via the ``keywords`` metadata, as is standard in HTML. The two can be used interchangeably. Note that, aside from the title, none of this article metadata is mandatory: if the date is not specified and ``DEFAULT_DATE`` is set to ``fs``, Pelican will rely on the file's "mtime" timestamp, and the category can be determined by the directory in which the file resides. For example, a file located at ``python/foobar/myfoobar.rst`` will have a category of ``foobar``. If you would like to organize your files in other ways where the name of the subfolder would not be a good category name, you can set the setting ``USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY`` to ``False``. When parsing dates given in the page metadata, Pelican supports the W3C's `suggested subset ISO 8601`__. __ `W3C ISO 8601`_ If you do not explicitly specify summary metadata for a given post, the ``SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH`` setting can be used to specify how many words from the beginning of an article are used as the summary. You can also extract any metadata from the filename through a regular expression to be set in the ``FILENAME_METADATA`` setting. All named groups that are matched will be set in the metadata object. The default value for the ``FILENAME_METADATA`` setting will only extract the date from the filename. For example, if you would like to extract both the date and the slug, you could set something like: ``'(?P\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P.*)'`` Please note that the metadata available inside your files takes precedence over the metadata extracted from the filename. Pages ----- If you create a folder named ``pages`` inside the content folder, all the files in it will be used to generate static pages, such as **About** or **Contact** pages. (See example filesystem layout below.) You can use the ``DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU`` setting to control whether all those pages are displayed in the primary navigation menu. (Default is ``True``.) If you want to exclude any pages from being linked to or listed in the menu then add a ``status: hidden`` attribute to its metadata. This is useful for things like making error pages that fit the generated theme of your site. Linking to internal content --------------------------- From Pelican 3.1 onwards, it is now possible to specify intra-site links to files in the *source content* hierarchy instead of files in the *generated* hierarchy. This makes it easier to link from the current post to other posts and images that may be sitting alongside the current post (instead of having to determine where those resources will be placed after site generation). To link to internal content (files in the ``content`` directory), use the following syntax: ``|filename|path/to/file``:: website/ ├── content │   ├── article1.rst │   ├── cat/ │   │   └── article2.md │ └── pages │      └── about.md └── pelican.conf.py In this example, ``article1.rst`` could look like:: The first article ################# :date: 2012-12-01 10:02 See below intra-site link examples in reStructuredText format. `a link relative to content root <|filename|/cat/article2.rst>`_ `a link relative to current file <|filename|cat/article2.rst>`_ and ``article2.md``:: Title: The second article Date: 2012-12-01 10:02 See below intra-site link examples in Markdown format. [a link relative to content root](|filename|/article1.md) [a link relative to current file](|filename|../article1.md) Embedding non-article or non-page content is slightly different in that the directories need to be specified in ``pelicanconf.py`` file. The ``images`` directory is configured for this by default but others will need to be added manually:: content ├── images │   └── han.jpg └── misc    └── image-test.md And ``image-test.md`` would include:: ![Alt Text](|filename|/images/han.jpg) Any content can be linked in this way. What happens is that the ``images`` directory gets copied to ``output/static/`` upon publishing. This is because ``images`` is in the ``settings["STATIC_PATHS"]`` list by default. If you want to have another directory, say ``pdfs`` you would need to add the following to ``pelicanconf.py``:: STATIC_PATHS = ['images', 'pdfs'] And then the ``pdfs`` directory would also be copied to ``output/static/``. Importing an existing blog -------------------------- It is possible to import your blog from Dotclear, WordPress, and RSS feeds using a simple script. See :ref:`import`. Translations ------------ It is possible to translate articles. To do so, you need to add a ``lang`` meta attribute to your articles/pages and set a ``DEFAULT_LANG`` setting (which is English [en] by default). With those settings in place, only articles with the default language will be listed, and each article will be accompanied by a list of available translations for that article. Pelican uses the article's URL "slug" to determine if two or more articles are translations of one another. The slug can be set manually in the file's metadata; if not set explicitly, Pelican will auto-generate the slug from the title of the article. Here is an example of two articles, one in English and the other in French. The English article:: Foobar is not dead ################## :slug: foobar-is-not-dead :lang: en That's true, foobar is still alive! And the French version:: Foobar n'est pas mort ! ####################### :slug: foobar-is-not-dead :lang: fr Oui oui, foobar est toujours vivant ! Post content quality notwithstanding, you can see that only item in common between the two articles is the slug, which is functioning here as an identifier. If you'd rather not explicitly define the slug this way, you must then instead ensure that the translated article titles are identical, since the slug will be auto-generated from the article title. If you do not want the original version of one specific article to be detected by the ``DEFAULT_LANG`` setting, use the ``translation`` metadata to specify which posts are translations:: Foobar is not dead ################## :slug: foobar-is-not-dead :lang: en :translation: true That's true, foobar is still alive! Syntax highlighting ------------------- Pelican is able to provide colorized syntax highlighting for your code blocks. To do so, you have to use the following conventions inside your content files. For reStructuredText, use the code-block directive:: .. code-block:: identifier For Markdown, include the language identifier just above the code block, indenting both the identifier and code:: A block of text. :::identifier The specified identifier (e.g. ``python``, ``ruby``) should be one that appears on the `list of available lexers `_. Publishing drafts ----------------- If you want to publish an article as a draft (for friends to review before publishing, for example), you can add a ``status: draft`` attribute to its metadata. That article will then be output to the ``drafts`` folder and not listed on the index page nor on any category page. .. _virtualenv: http://www.virtualenv.org/ .. _W3C ISO 8601: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime .. _Fabric: http://fabfile.org/ .. _AsciiDoc: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/