Fork me on GitHub
  2. Blog
  3. Start blog site on GitHub pages with Pelican

Start blog site on GitHub pages with Pelican

One day I found that I forgot many things I learned and used before, so I decided to make short memos about different programming aspects, issues and new tools I’ll learn and touch in the future.

Create GitHub user page

GitHub provides easy and nice possibility to create your own site with User Pages So as described in this tutoral I’ve created repo with special name kamyanskiy.github.io The content from master branch from this repo should be used to display on access https://kamyanskiy.github.io url.

Create site with Pelican

I found that possibility that provided from GitHub to have static pages with jekyll is nice, but Pelican is more powerful tool, with rich number of plugins and nice themes. So I checkout my kamyanskiy.github.io repository from branch master to pelican branch and start to install Pelican.

Step 1. Install Pelican.

$ virtualenv -p python3.6 .env
$ source .env/bin/activate
(.env) $ pip install pelican markdown

Step 2. Get pelican-pluginsand pelican-themes submodules

After review many nice themes on site http://www.pelicanthemes.com/ I’ve decided to use pelican-bootstrap3 theme, with little changes, so I’ve forked pelican-themes repo to make custom changes. 

$ git submodule add git@github.com:getpelican/pelican-plugins.git pelican-plugins
$ git submodule add https://github.com/kamyanskiy/pelican-themes pelican-themes

Step 3. Create simple site template

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

Then answer to questions or keep just all defaults, it’s possible to change all later, manually in file pelicanconf.py

Step 4. Configure pelicanconf.py

The all possible settings are described in documentation My settings file looks like:

 #!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- #
from __future__ import unicode_literals

AUTHOR = 'Alexander Kamyanskiy'
SITENAME = 'kamyanskiy.github.io'
SITEURL = 'https://kamyanskiy.github.io'

PATH = 'content'

TIMEZONE = 'Europe/Moscow'

DEFAULT_LANG = 'en'

# Feed generation is usually not desired when developing
FEED_ALL_ATOM = None
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM = None
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM = None
AUTHOR_FEED_ATOM = None
AUTHOR_FEED_RSS = None
SHOW_ARTICLE_AUTHOR = True
SHOW_DATE_MODIFIED = True

# Show my last activity on GitHub
GITHUB_USER = 'kamyanskiy'

# Enable custom theme
THEME = "pelican-themes/pelican-bootstrap3/"
BOOTSTRAP_THEME = "flatly"
JINJA_ENVIRONMENT = {'extensions': ['jinja2.ext.i18n']}
PYGMENTS_STYLE = 'emacs'
DEFAULT_DATE = 'fs'

# Enable plugins
PLUGIN_PATHS = ['pelican-plugins/']
PLUGINS = ['i18n_subsites']

# Enable disqus comments
DISQUS_SITENAME = "kamyanskiy"

SITELOGO = 'images/logo.png'

STATIC_PATHS = ['images', 'extra/custom.css']
CUSTOM_CSS = 'theme/css/custom.css'

EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {
    'extra/custom.css': {'path': 'theme/css/custom.css'}
}

# Blogroll
LINKS = (('Pelican', 'http://getpelican.com/'),
         ('Python.org', 'http://python.org/'),
         ('Jinja2', 'http://jinja.pocoo.org/'),
         ('Django', 'https://https://docs.djangoproject.com/'),
         ('Flask', 'http://flask.pocoo.org/'),
         )

# Social widget
SOCIAL = (('vk', 'https://vk.com/id216671695'),
          ('Facebook', 'https://www.facebook.com/alexander.kamyanskiy'),
          ('GitHub', 'https://github.com/kamyanskiy'),)

DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 5

# Uncomment following line if you want document-relative URLs when developing
RELATIVE_URLS = False
DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = True
TYPOGRIFY = True

Step 5. Add some content

I’ve added this page in .md format into content/20170613-start-site-with-pelican.md file

Step 6. Use Fabric to manage site

It’s possible to use fabric utility to make some useful things with site content, like run dev server and push changes to GitHub pages I’ve used Fabric3 to use with python3.6 on my machine

Install Fabric3

pip install fabric3 ghp-import

Fix fabfile.py (for usage with python3)

Change 

import SocketServer

to 

import socketserver

To use fab command to start dev server , run

$ fab serve

To publish content to master branch on github repo, run

$ fab gh_pages

P.S. After couple days I’ve changed this command to fab push

Part 2 - How to enable DISQUS comments

Comments

comments powered by Disqus