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How to use Pelican on GitHub Pages

How to use Pelican on GitHub Pages Gittip

Author: Josef Jezek

Install on Ubuntu

Installing Python tools

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

vi ~/.bashrc (maybe virtualenvwrapper.sh is in other location, change if necessary)

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

Load file .bashrc

source ~/.bashrc

Create virtualenv with virtualenvwrapper

mkvirtualenv blog
workon blog

And to leave

deactivate

Installing Pelican

sudo pip install pelican markdown ghp-import shovel

Upgrading Pelican

sudo pip install --upgrade pelican markdown ghp-import shovel

Creating a blog on GitHub Pages

We need to make a respository. For example blog, so our blog url will be user.github.com/blog. If you want to set a custom domain see link: Setting up a custom domain with Pages

Prepare git

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com
git config --global core.editor vi

Clone git repository

git clone git@github.com:user/blog.git
cd blog

Create in the root folder a file .gitignore

vi .gitignore

#Custom
output
pelicanconf_local.py

#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

Download Themes

Clone pelican-themes repository

git clone --recursive https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes themes

Create Pelican settings file

Create settings file called pelicanconf.py from sample pelican.conf.py

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

Add this variables

THEME = 'themes/bootstrap2'
OUTPUT_PATH = 'output'
PATH = 'content'

Period archives work best when the final path segment is index.html, see URL Settings

ARTICLE_URL = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%m}/{slug}/'
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%m}/{slug}/index.html'

Custom Home page

Add this variables to pelicanconf.py

# Custom Home page
DIRECT_TEMPLATES = (('index', 'blog', 'tags', 'categories', 'archives'))
PAGINATED_DIRECT_TEMPLATES = (('blog',))
TEMPLATE_PAGES = {'home.html': 'index.html',}

Duplicated the index.html to blog.html in your template folder and add this lines:

{% set active_page = "blog" %}
{% block title %}{{ SITENAME }} - Blog{% endblock %}

Create home.html or use page override feature to use a Markdown page as your home page.

vi home.html

{% extends "base.html" %}
{% block content %}
<div class='page'>
  <div class="page-header"><h1>Home</h1></div>
  <div class="page-content">Content</div>
</div>
{% endblock %}

Creating post

mkdir -p content/posts/2013/07
vi content/posts/2013/07/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

This is the content of my blog post.

Generate blog

To generate the static html we use:

pelican -s pelicanconf.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 pelicanconf.py -o /tmp/blog

Issues

  • WARNING: LOCALE option doesn't contain a correct value see Ubuntu Locale

Then we have a new directory named output, our blog is there, so, to test it , insert there and run a simple server:

cd output
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
# For Python 3
python -m http.server 8000

Point your browser to localhost:8000 and you will see the blog.

Deploying the blog

Point your browser to you.github.com/blog , Awesome!!!

Resources

@yasoob
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yasoob commented Nov 24, 2013

That was purely awsome

@michaelaye
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I don't get it. The html files are produced in the output folder, but the output folder is in .gitignore, so I guess they should not be pushed to github, so how is the html transported to github?

@ninly
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ninly commented Jan 18, 2014

@michaelaye: He doesn't go into detail here, but he installs ghp-import, which takes care of that by putting the output in a branch of the git repo. This part of the pelican docs explains how it works.

@Kentoseth
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@michaelaye: What you should normally do is to keep the output in a separate git repo. When you want to push to github pages, this becomes very easy. You just copy whatever is in the generated output to your specified repo for hosting the static files (eg. yourusername.github.io).

This is what I've read about others using the technique I mentioned.

@pouyamn
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pouyamn commented Mar 30, 2019

this is really incomplete and useless as a tutorial :(

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ghost commented May 2, 2021

Anyone guide me about theme how to change my pelican project theme

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