Pelican Web Site Generator Configuration
Pelican is a static web site generator. It is the tool we are using to maintain our static sites.
This documet assumes we are using venvwrapper [1].
Install Pelican
Do it within our python virtual environment. We named our environment statsites.
Activate it, and install Pelican
venv statsites
pip install pelican
Themes
In each of our pelicanconf.py configurations we select a theme for the given site. To get a collection of themes to choose from, we cloned as follows:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes ${HOME}/pelican-themes
Site Theme Note
In our own sites we have made a few adjustments to the lightweight theme to suit our purpose. We maintain this derived theme and our web content under our git version control repository. Our pelicanconf-en.py configuration file has this reference.
THEME = u"/home/ubuntu/allrepos/mystatic_sites/derived-themes/lightweight-single-home-en"
Your site's theme will be for you to choose and/or modify.
Initialize Skeletal Site File Sytem
Use 'pelican-quickstart' to generate initial static website content using pelican.
pelican-quickstart creates the a skeletal site generation file system beneath the current empty directory.
Afterwards you create .rst files in content/anyname directories as blog articles. Ccreate .rst files in content/pages as blog pages.
Compilation
Generate the web site files once we have all our .rst source files. For this we only need to use the Makefile. The following will compile and emit all the web site content under output/ using pelican.
make html
Your can review your results by invoking the output/index.html file.
| [1] | We are using the package venvwrapper to simplify virtual environment management. That fact is assumed in this document. If you are not using it, you need to replace lines here such as: "venv statsites", with lines such as "source ${HOME}/.venv/statsites/bin/activate". |