How to Deploy and Manage a Pelican Blog

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On September 20, 2023

Pelican is a popular open source static site generator written in Python. It allows you to convert markdown or reST formatted content into HTML pages using Jinja templates. Pelican is great for creating blogs, documentation sites, and simple websites. In this guide, I’ll walk through how to install Pelican, create and manage content, generate your site, and deploy it.

Prerequisites DELETE COPY CODE AND OTHER STUFF

Python 3.x
Pip (usually comes preinstalled with Python 3.x)

Install Pelican and Markdown

First, create and activate a virtual environment for your project, then install Pelican with markdown support:

python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install pelican[markdown]

Create a New Site

Use the pelican-quickstart command to generate the initial folder structure and configuration file (pelicanconf.py) for your site:

pelican-quickstart

Follow the prompts to specify your site title, author name, URL, timezone, etc. This will create a skeleton project in the current directory.

Add Your Content

Pelican supports Markdown and reST formatted content. Create your articles/pages in the content folder. For example:

content/ - article1.md - page1.rst

Create/Edit Themes

The look and feel of your site is controlled by themes. Pelican comes with a default theme you can modify, or you can create/download other themes. Theme files live in the themes folder.

Generate Your Site

Run this command from your project root to generate the HTML output from your content and themes:

pelican content

The HTML files will be output to the output folder.

Preview Your Site

Install the HTTP server for previewing your site locally:

pip install pelican[dev] pelican --listen

This will launch a local web server at http://localhost:8000 where you can view your site.

Deploy Using SSH

To deploy your site via SSH:

Generate the final HTML output: pelican content -s pelicanconf.py
Copy the output folder to your production server: scp -r output/ your_server:/path/to/webroot
Set the permissions: ssh your_server 'chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/webroot'

Your Pelican site will now be live!

Custom Domains

To use a custom domain, configure your site’s URL in pelicanconf.py and set up the domain with your DNS provider to point to your server IP.

Automate Publishing

You canautomate site generation and deployment using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins. Or use the Makefile included with Pelican which has commands like make devserver and make publish.

This covers the basics of managing a simple Pelican site! Pelican has many other powerful features for creating more complex sites and blogs. The documentation at https://docs.getpelican.com is a great resource to learn more. Let us know if you have any other questions!

Conclusion

Keywords: How to, Guide, Walkthrough, Python, Pelican, Blog website

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