Quickstart

Reading through all the documentation is highly recommended, but for the truly impatient, following are some quick steps to get started.

Installation

Install Pelican (and optionally Markdown if you intend to use it) on Python >=3.8.1 by running the following command in your preferred terminal, prefixing with sudo if permissions warrant:

python -m pip install "pelican[markdown]"

Create a project

First, choose a name for your project, create an appropriately-named directory for your site, and switch to that directory:

mkdir -p ~/projects/yoursite
cd ~/projects/yoursite

Create a skeleton project via the pelican-quickstart command, which begins by asking some questions about your site:

pelican-quickstart

For questions that have default values denoted in brackets, feel free to use the Return key to accept those default values [1]. When asked for your URL prefix, enter your domain name as indicated (e.g., https://example.com).

Create an article

You cannot run Pelican until you have created some content. Use your preferred text editor to create your first article with the following content:

Title: My First Review
Date: 2010-12-03 10:20
Category: Review
Following is a review of my favorite mechanical keyboard.

Given that this example article is in Markdown format, save it as ~/projects/yoursite/content/keyboard-review.md.

Generate your site

From your project root directory, run the pelican command to generate your site:

pelican content

Your site has now been generated inside the output/ directory. (You may see a warning related to feeds, but that is normal when developing locally and can be ignored for now.)

Preview your site

Open a new terminal session, navigate to your project root directory, and run the following command to launch Pelican's web server:

pelican --listen

Preview your site by navigating to http://localhost:8000/ in your browser.

Continue reading the other documentation sections for more detail, and check out the Pelican wiki's Tutorials page for links to community-published tutorials.

Footnotes

[1]

You can help localize default fields by installing the optional tzlocal module.

Installing Pelican

Pelican currently runs best on >=3.8.1; earlier versions of Python are not supported.

You can install Pelican via several different methods. The simplest is via Pip:

python -m pip install pelican

Or, if you plan on using Markdown:

python -m pip install "pelican[markdown]"

(Keep in mind that some operating systems will require you to prefix the above command 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
source bin/activate

Once the virtual environment has been created and activated, Pelican can be installed via python -m 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:

python -m pip install -e "git+https://github.com/getpelican/pelican.git#egg=pelican"

Once Pelican is installed, you can run pelican --help to see basic usage options. For more detail, refer to the Publish section.

Optional packages

If you plan on using Markdown as a markup format, you can install Pelican with Markdown support:

python -m pip install "pelican[markdown]"

Typographical enhancements can be enabled in your settings file, but first the requisite Typogrify library must be installed:

python -m pip install typogrify

Dependencies

When Pelican is installed, the following dependent Python packages should be automatically installed without any action on your part:

Upgrading

If you installed a stable Pelican release via Pip and wish to upgrade to the latest stable release, you can do so by adding --upgrade:

python -m 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.

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

If run inside an activated virtual environment, pelican-quickstart will look for an associated project path inside $VIRTUAL_ENV/.project. If that file exists and contains a valid directory path, the new Pelican project will be saved at that location. Otherwise, the default is the current working directory. To set the new project path on initial invocation, use: pelican-quickstart --path /your/desired/directory

Once you finish answering all the questions, your project will consist of the following hierarchy (except for pages — shown in parentheses below — which you can optionally add yourself if you plan to create non-chronological content):

yourproject/
├── content
│   └── (pages)
├── output
├── tasks.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.

Writing content

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).

You can find sample content in the repository at samples/content/.

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
:modified: 2010-10-04 18:40
:tags: thats, awesome
:category: yeah
:slug: my-super-post
:authors: Alexis Metaireau, Conan Doyle
:summary: Short version for index and feeds

Author and tag lists may be semicolon-separated instead, which allows you to write authors and tags containing commas:

:tags: pelican, publishing tool; pelican, bird
:authors: Metaireau, Alexis; Doyle, Conan

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 Python-Markdown package, which can be done via pip install Markdown.

Pelican also supports Markdown Extensions, which might have to be installed separately if they are not included in the default Markdown package and can be configured and loaded via the MARKDOWN setting.

Metadata syntax for Markdown posts should follow this pattern:

Title: My super title
Date: 2010-12-03 10:20
Modified: 2010-12-05 19:30
Category: Python
Tags: pelican, publishing
Slug: my-super-post
Authors: Alexis Metaireau, Conan Doyle
Summary: Short version for index and feeds
This is the content of my super blog post.

You can also have your own metadata keys (so long as they don't conflict with reserved metadata keywords) for use in your templates. The following table contains a list of reserved metadata keywords:

Readers for additional formats (such as AsciiDoc) are available via plugins, which you can find via the Pelican Plugins collection as well as the legacy pelican-plugins repository.

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:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>My super title</title>
        <meta name="tags" content="thats, awesome" />
        <meta name="date" content="2012-07-09 22:28" />
        <meta name="modified" content="2012-07-10 20:14" />
        <meta name="category" content="yeah" />
        <meta name="authors" content="Alexis Métaireau, Conan Doyle" />
        <meta name="summary" content="Short version for index and feeds" />
    </head>
    <body>
        This is the content of my super blog post.
    </body>
</html>

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 content 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.

So the title is the only required metadata. If that bothers you, worry not. Instead of manually specifying a title in your metadata each time, you can use the source content file name as the title. For example, a Markdown source file named Publishing via Pelican.md would automatically be assigned a title of Publishing via Pelican. If you would prefer this behavior, add the following line to your settings file:

FILENAME_METADATA = '(?P<title>.*)'

NOTE:

modified should be last time you updated the article, and defaults to date if not specified. Besides you can show modified in the templates, feed entries in feed readers will be updated automatically when you set modified to the current date after you modified your article.

authors is a comma-separated list of article authors. If there's only one author you can use author field.

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<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'

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.

Static content

Static files are files other than articles and pages that are copied to the output folder as-is, without processing. You can control which static files are copied over with the STATIC_PATHS setting of the project's pelicanconf.py file. Pelican's default configuration includes the images directory for this, but others must be added manually. In addition, static files that are explicitly linked to are included (see below).

NOTE:

Mixed content in the same directory

Starting with Pelican 3.5, static files can safely share a source directory with page source files, without exposing the page sources in the generated site. Any such directory must be added to both STATIC_PATHS and PAGE_PATHS (or STATIC_PATHS and ARTICLE_PATHS). Pelican will identify and process the page source files normally, and copy the remaining files as if they lived in a separate directory reserved for static files.

Note: Placing static and content source files together in the same source directory does not guarantee that they will end up in the same place in the generated site. The easiest way to do this is by using the {attach} link syntax (described below). Alternatively, the STATIC_SAVE_AS, PAGE_SAVE_AS, and ARTICLE_SAVE_AS settings (and the corresponding *_URL settings) can be configured to place files of different types together, just as they could in earlier versions of Pelican.

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 content that may be sitting alongside that post (instead of having to determine where the other content will be placed after site generation).

To link to internal content (files in the content directory), use the following syntax for the link target: {filename}path/to/file. Note: forward slashes, /, are the required path separator in the {filename} directive on all operating systems, including Windows.

For example, a Pelican project might be structured like this:

website/
├── content
│   ├── category/
│   │   └── article1.rst
│   ├── article2.md
│   └── pages
│       └── about.md
└── pelican.conf.py

In this example, article1.rst could look like this:

The first article
#################
:date: 2012-12-01 10:02
See below intra-site link examples in reStructuredText format.
`a link relative to the current file <{filename}../article2.md>`_
`a link relative to the content root <{filename}/article2.md>`_

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 the current file]({filename}category/article1.rst)
[a link relative to the content root]({filename}/category/article1.rst)

Linking to static files

You can link to static content using {static}path/to/file. Files linked to with this syntax will automatically be copied to the output directory, even if the source directories containing them are not included in the STATIC_PATHS setting of the project's pelicanconf.py file.

For example, a project's content directory might be structured like this:

content
├── images
│   └── han.jpg
├── pdfs
│   └── menu.pdf
└── pages
    └── test.md

test.md would include:

![Alt Text]({static}/images/han.jpg)
[Our Menu]({static}/pdfs/menu.pdf)

Site generation would then copy han.jpg to output/images/han.jpg, menu.pdf to output/pdfs/menu.pdf, and write the appropriate links in test.md.

If you use {static} to link to an article or a page, this will be turned into a link to its source code.

Attaching static files

Starting with Pelican 3.5, static files can be "attached" to a page or article using this syntax for the link target: {attach}path/to/file. This works like the {static} syntax, but also relocates the static file into the linking document's output directory. If the static file originates from a subdirectory beneath the linking document's source, that relationship will be preserved on output. Otherwise, it will become a sibling of the linking document.

This only works for linking to static files.

For example, a project's content directory might be structured like this:

content
├── blog
│   ├── icons
│   │   └── icon.png
│   ├── photo.jpg
│   └── testpost.md
└── downloads
    └── archive.zip

pelicanconf.py would include:

PATH = 'content'
ARTICLE_PATHS = ['blog']
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = '{date:%Y}/{slug}.html'
ARTICLE_URL = '{date:%Y}/{slug}.html'

testpost.md would include:

Title: Test Post
Category: test
Date: 2014-10-31
![Icon]({attach}icons/icon.png)
![Photo]({attach}photo.jpg)
[Downloadable File]({attach}/downloads/archive.zip)

Site generation would then produce an output directory structured like this:

output
└── 2014
    ├── archive.zip
    ├── icons
    │   └── icon.png
    ├── photo.jpg
    └── test-post.html

Notice that all the files linked using {attach} ended up in or beneath the article's output directory.

If a static file is linked multiple times, the relocating feature of {attach} will only work in the first of those links to be processed. After the first link, Pelican will treat {attach} like {static}. This avoids breaking the already-processed links.

Be careful when linking to a file from multiple documents: Since the first link to a file finalizes its location and Pelican does not define the order in which documents are processed, using {attach} on a file linked by multiple documents can cause its location to change from one site build to the next. (Whether this happens in practice will depend on the operating system, file system, version of Pelican, and documents being added, modified, or removed from the project.) Any external sites linking to the file's old location might then find their links broken. It is therefore advisable to use {attach} only if you use it in all links to a file, and only if the linking documents share a single directory. Under these conditions, the file's output location will not change in future builds. In cases where these precautions are not possible, consider using {static} links instead of {attach}, and letting the file's location be determined by the project's STATIC_SAVE_AS and STATIC_URL settings. (Per-file save_as and url overrides can still be set in EXTRA_PATH_METADATA.)

NOTE:

Linking to authors, categories, index and tags

You can link to authors, categories, index and tags using the {author}name, {category}foobar, {index} and {tag}tagname syntax.

Deprecated internal link syntax

To remain compatible with earlier versions, Pelican still supports vertical bars (||) in addition to curly braces ({}) for internal links. For example: |filename|an_article.rst, |tag|tagname, |category|foobar. The syntax was changed from || to {} to avoid collision with Markdown extensions or reST directives. Similarly, Pelican also still supports linking to static content with {filename}. The syntax was changed to {static} to allow linking to both generated articles and pages and their static sources.

Support for the old syntax may eventually be removed.

Including other files

Both Markdown and reStructuredText syntaxes provide mechanisms for this.

Following below are some examples for reStructuredText using the include directive:

.. include:: file.rst

Include a fragment of a file delimited by two identifiers, highlighted as C++ (slicing based on line numbers is also possible):

.. include:: main.cpp
    :code: c++
    :start-after: // begin
    :end-before: // end

Include a raw HTML file (or an inline SVG) and put it directly into the output without any processing:

.. raw:: html
    :file: table.html

For Markdown, one must rely on an extension. For example, using the mdx_include plugin:

```html
{! template.html !}
```

Importing an existing site

It is possible to import your site from WordPress, Tumblr, Dotclear, and RSS feeds using a simple script. See Importing an existing site.

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.

NOTE:

By default, Pelican uses the article's URL "slug" to determine if two or more articles are translations of one another. (This can be changed with the ARTICLE_TRANSLATION_ID setting.) 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 can provide colorized syntax highlighting for your code blocks. To do so, you must use the following conventions inside your content files.

For reStructuredText, use the code-block directive to specify the type of code to be highlighted (in these examples, we'll use python):

.. code-block:: python
   print("Pelican is a static site generator.")

For Markdown, which utilizes the CodeHilite extension to provide syntax highlighting, include the language identifier just above the code block, indenting both the identifier and the code:

There are two ways to specify the identifier:
    :::python
    print("The triple-colon syntax will *not* show line numbers.")
To display line numbers, use a path-less shebang instead of colons:
    #!python
    print("The path-less shebang syntax *will* show line numbers.")

The specified identifier (e.g. python, ruby) should be one that appears on the list of available lexers.

When using reStructuredText the following options are available in the code-block directive:

Note that, depending on the version, your Pygments module might not have all of these options available. Refer to the HtmlFormatter section of the Pygments documentation for more details on each of the options.

For example, the following code block enables line numbers, starting at 153, and prefixes the Pygments CSS classes with pgcss to make the names more unique and avoid possible CSS conflicts:

.. code-block:: identifier
    :classprefix: pgcss
    :linenos: table
    :linenostart: 153
   <indented code block goes here>

It is also possible to specify the PYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS variable in your Pelican settings file to include options that will be automatically applied to every code block.

For example, if you want to have line numbers displayed for every code block and a CSS prefix, you would set this variable to:

PYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS = {'classprefix': 'pgcss', 'linenos': 'table'}

If specified, settings for individual code blocks will override the defaults in your settings file.

Publishing drafts

If you want to publish an article or a page 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 or tag page.

If your articles should be automatically published as a draft (to not accidentally publish an article before it is finished), include the status in the DEFAULT_METADATA:

DEFAULT_METADATA = {
    'status': 'draft',
}

To publish a post when the default status is draft, update the post's metadata to include Status: published.

Hidden Posts

Like pages, posts can also be marked as hidden with the Status: hidden attribute. Hidden posts will be output to ARTICLE_SAVE_AS as expected, but are not included by default in tag, category, and author indexes, nor in the main article feed. This has the effect of creating an "unlisted" post.

Publish your site

Site generation

Once Pelican is installed and you have some content (e.g., in Markdown or reST format), you can convert your 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. On non-Windows environments, this option can also be combined with the -l or --listen option to simultaneously both auto-regenerate and serve the output at http://localhost:8000:

pelican --autoreload --listen

Pelican has other command-line switches available. Have a look at the help to see all the options you can use:

pelican --help

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 use your browser to open the generated HTML files directly:

firefox output/index.html

Because the above method may have trouble locating your CSS and other linked assets, running Pelican's simple built-in web server will often provide a more reliable previewing experience:

pelican --listen

Once the web server has been started, you can preview your site at: http://localhost:8000/

Deployment

After you have generated your site, previewed it in your local development environment, and are ready to deploy it to production, you might first re-generate your site with any production-specific settings (e.g., analytics, feeds, etc.) that you may have defined:

pelican content -s publishconf.py

To base your publish configuration on top of your pelicanconf.py, you can import your pelicanconf settings by including the following line in your publishconf.py:

from pelicanconf import *

If you have generated a publishconf.py using pelican-quickstart, this line is included by default.

The steps for deploying your site will depend on where it will be hosted. If you have SSH access to a server running Nginx or Apache, you might use the rsync tool to transmit your site files:

rsync -avc --delete output/ host.example.com:/var/www/your-site/

There are many other deployment options, some of which can be configured when first setting up your site via the pelican-quickstart command. See the Tips page for detail on publishing via GitHub Pages.

Automation

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 pertains to whether you want to automate site generation and publication. If you answered "yes" to that question, a tasks.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 be 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.

Invoke

The advantage of Invoke 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 Invoke, prefixing with sudo if your environment requires it:

python -m pip install invoke

Take a moment to open the tasks.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:

invoke 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:

invoke regenerate

To serve the generated site so it can be previewed in your browser at http://localhost:8000/:

invoke serve

To serve the generated site with automatic browser reloading every time a change is detected, first python -m pip install livereload, then use the following command:

invoke livereload

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:

invoke publish

These are just a few of the commands available by default, so feel free to explore tasks.py and see what other commands are available. More importantly, don't hesitate to customize tasks.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 using the settings in pelicanconf.py, run:

make html

To generate the site for production, using the settings in publishconf.py, run:

make publish

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.

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.

(The default Makefile and devserver.sh scripts use the python and pelican executables to complete its tasks. If you want to use different executables, such as python3, you can set the PY and PELICAN environment variables, respectively, to override the default executable names.)

Settings

Pelican is configurable thanks to a settings file you can pass to the command line:

pelican content -s path/to/your/pelicanconf.py

If you used the pelican-quickstart command, your primary settings file will be named pelicanconf.py by default.

You can also specify settings via -e / --extra-settings option flags. It will override default settings as well as any defined within the setting file. Note that values must follow JSON notation:

pelican content -e SITENAME='"A site"' READERS='{"html": null}' CACHE_CONTENT=true

Environment variables can also be used here but must be escaped appropriately:

pelican content -e API_KEY=''\"$API_KEY\"''

NOTE:

Settings are configured in the form of a Python module (a file). There is an example settings file available for reference.

To see a list of current settings in your environment, including both default and any customized values, run the following command (append one or more specific setting names as arguments to see values for those settings only):

pelican --print-settings

All the setting identifiers must be set in all-caps, otherwise they will not be processed. Setting values that are numbers (5, 20, etc.), booleans (True, False, None, etc.), dictionaries, or tuples should not be enclosed in quotation marks. All other values (i.e., strings) must be enclosed in quotation marks.

Unless otherwise specified, settings that refer to paths can be either absolute or relative to the configuration file. The settings you define in the configuration file will be passed to the templates, which allows you to use your settings to add site-wide content.

Here is a list of settings for Pelican:

Basic settings

OUTPUT_RETENTION = [".hg", ".git", ".bzr"]

import sys
sys.path.append('to/your/path')
from custom_filter import urlencode_filter
JINJA_FILTERS = {'urlencode': urlencode_filter}

LOG_FILTER = [(logging.WARN, 'TAG_SAVE_AS is set to False')]

READERS = {'html': None}

READERS = {'foo': FooReader}

MARKDOWN = {
    'extension_configs': {
        'markdown.extensions.codehilite': {'css_class': 'highlight'},
        'markdown.extensions.extra': {},
        'markdown.extensions.meta': {},
    },
    'output_format': 'html5',
}

URL settings

The first thing to understand is that there are currently two supported methods for URL formation: relative and absolute. Relative URLs are useful when testing locally, and absolute URLs are reliable and most useful when publishing. One method of supporting both is to have one Pelican configuration file for local development and another for publishing. To see an example of this type of setup, use the pelican-quickstart script as described in the Installation section, which will produce two separate configuration files for local development and publishing, respectively.

You can customize the URLs and locations where files will be saved. The *_URL and *_SAVE_AS variables use Python's format strings. These variables allow you to place your articles in a location such as {slug}/index.html and link to them as {slug} for clean URLs (see example below). These settings give you the flexibility to place your articles and pages anywhere you want.

NOTE:

If you don't want that flexibility and instead prefer that your generated output paths mirror your source content's filesystem path hierarchy, try the following settings:

PATH_METADATA = '(?P<path_no_ext>.*)\..*'
ARTICLE_URL = ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = PAGE_URL = PAGE_SAVE_AS = '{path_no_ext}.html'

Otherwise, you can use a variety of file metadata attributes within URL-related settings:

Example usage:

ARTICLE_URL = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/{date:%d}/{slug}/'
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/{date:%d}/{slug}/index.html'
PAGE_URL = 'pages/{slug}/'
PAGE_SAVE_AS = 'pages/{slug}/index.html'

This would save your articles into something like /posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/index.html, save your pages into /pages/about/index.html, and render them available at URLs of /posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/ and /pages/about/, respectively.

NOTE:

NOTE:

Pelican can optionally create per-year, per-month, and per-day archives of your posts. These secondary archives are disabled by default but are automatically enabled if you supply format strings for their respective _SAVE_AS settings. Period archives fit intuitively with the hierarchical model of web URLs and can make it easier for readers to navigate through the posts you've written over time.

Example usage:

YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/index.html'
YEAR_ARCHIVE_URL = 'posts/{date:%Y}/'
MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/index.html'
MONTH_ARCHIVE_URL = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/'

With these settings, Pelican will create an archive of all your posts for the year at (for instance) posts/2011/index.html and an archive of all your posts for the month at posts/2011/Aug/index.html. These can be accessed through the URLs posts/2011/ and posts/2011/Aug/, respectively.

NOTE:

DIRECT_TEMPLATES work a bit differently than noted above. Only the _SAVE_AS settings are available, but it is available for any direct template.

URLs for direct template pages are theme-dependent. Some themes use corresponding *_URL setting as string, while others hard-code them: 'archives.html', 'authors.html', 'categories.html', 'tags.html'.

Time and Date

DATE_FORMATS = {
    'en': '%a, %d %b %Y',
    'jp': '%Y-%m-%d(%a)',
}

# On Unix/Linux
DATE_FORMATS = {
    'en': ('en_US','%a, %d %b %Y'),
    'jp': ('ja_JP','%Y-%m-%d(%a)'),
}
# On Windows
DATE_FORMATS = {
    'en': ('usa','%a, %d %b %Y'),
    'jp': ('jpn','%Y-%m-%d(%a)'),
}

LOCALE = ('usa', 'jpn',      # On Windows
          'en_US', 'ja_JP'   # On Unix/Linux
)

[1]

Default is the system locale.

Template pages

TEMPLATE_PAGES = {'src/books.html': 'dest/books.html',
                  'src/resume.html': 'dest/resume.html',
                  'src/contact.html': 'dest/contact.html'}

Metadata

FILENAME_METADATA = r'(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'

Not all metadata needs to be embedded in source file itself. For example, blog posts are often named following a YYYY-MM-DD-SLUG.rst pattern, or nested into YYYY/MM/DD-SLUG directories. To extract metadata from the filename or path, set FILENAME_METADATA or PATH_METADATA to regular expressions that use Python's group name notation (?P<name>…). If you want to attach additional metadata but don't want to encode it in the path, you can set EXTRA_PATH_METADATA:

EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {
    'relative/path/to/file-1': {
        'key-1a': 'value-1a',
        'key-1b': 'value-1b',
        },
    'relative/path/to/file-2': {
        'key-2': 'value-2',
        },
    }

This can be a convenient way to shift the installed location of a particular file:

# Take advantage of the following defaults
# STATIC_SAVE_AS = '{path}'
# STATIC_URL = '{path}'
STATIC_PATHS = [
    'static/robots.txt',
    ]
EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {
    'static/robots.txt': {'path': 'robots.txt'},
    }

Feed settings

By default, Pelican uses Atom feeds. However, it is also possible to use RSS feeds if you prefer.

Pelican generates category feeds as well as feeds for all your articles. It does not generate feeds for tags by default, but it is possible to do so using the TAG_FEED_ATOM and TAG_FEED_RSS settings:

If you don't want to generate some or any of these feeds, set the above variables to None.

[2]

{slug} is replaced by name of the category / author / tag.

Pagination

The default behaviour of Pelican is to list all the article titles along with a short description on the index page. While this works well for small-to-medium sites, sites with a large quantity of articles will probably benefit from paginating this list.

You can use the following settings to configure the pagination.

Using Pagination Patterns

By default, pages subsequent to .../foo.html are created as .../foo2.html, etc. The PAGINATION_PATTERNS setting can be used to change this. It takes a sequence of triples, where each triple consists of:

(minimum_page, page_url, page_save_as,)

For page_url and page_save_as, you may use a number of variables. {url} and {save_as} correspond respectively to the *_URL and *_SAVE_AS values of the corresponding page type (e.g. ARTICLE_SAVE_AS). If {save_as} == foo/bar.html, then {name} == foo/bar and {extension} == .html. {base_name} equals {name} except that it strips trailing /index if present. {number} equals the page number.

For example, if you want to leave the first page unchanged, but place subsequent pages at .../page/2/ etc, you could set PAGINATION_PATTERNS as follows:

PAGINATION_PATTERNS = (
    (1, '{url}', '{save_as}'),
    (2, '{base_name}/page/{number}/', '{base_name}/page/{number}/index.html'),
)

If you want a pattern to apply to the last page in the list, use -1 as the minimum_page value:

(-1, '{base_name}/last/', '{base_name}/last/index.html'),

Translations

Pelican offers a way to translate articles. See the Content section for more information.

[3]

{lang} is the language code

Ordering content

Themes

Creating Pelican themes is addressed in a dedicated section (see Themes). However, here are the settings that are related to themes.

{% extends '!theme/article.html' %}

By default, two themes are available. You can specify them using the THEME setting or by passing the -t option to the pelican command:

There are a number of other themes available at https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes. Pelican comes with pelican-themes, a small script for managing themes.

You can define your own theme, either by starting from scratch or by duplicating and modifying a pre-existing theme. Here is a guide on how to create your theme.

Following are example ways to specify your preferred theme:

# Specify name of a built-in theme
THEME = "notmyidea"
# Specify name of a theme installed via the pelican-themes tool
THEME = "chunk"
# Specify a customized theme, via path relative to the settings file
THEME = "themes/mycustomtheme"
# Specify a customized theme, via absolute path
THEME = "/home/myuser/projects/mysite/themes/mycustomtheme"

The built-in simple theme can be customized using the following settings.

The built-in notmyidea theme can make good use of the following settings. Feel free to use them in your themes as well.

ANALYTICS = """
    <script src="/theme/js/primary-analytics.js"></script>
    <script>
        [ … in-line Javascript code for secondary analytics … ]
    </script>
"""

In addition, you can use the "wide" version of the notmyidea theme by adding the following to your configuration:

CSS_FILE = "wide.css"

Logging

Sometimes, a long list of warnings may appear during site generation. Finding the meaningful error message in the middle of tons of annoying log output can be quite tricky. In order to filter out redundant log messages, Pelican comes with the LOG_FILTER setting.

LOG_FILTER should be a list of tuples (level, msg), each of them being composed of the logging level (up to warning) and the message to be ignored. Simply populate the list with the log messages you want to hide, and they will be filtered out.

For example:

import logging
LOG_FILTER = [(logging.WARN, 'TAG_SAVE_AS is set to False')]

It is possible to filter out messages by a template. Check out source code to obtain a template.

For example:

import logging
LOG_FILTER = [(logging.WARN, 'Empty alt attribute for image %s in %s')]

WARNING:

NOTE:

Reading only modified content

To speed up the build process, Pelican can optionally read only articles and pages with modified content.

When Pelican is about to read some content source file:

If CONTENT_CACHING_LAYER is set to 'reader' (the default), the raw content and metadata returned by a reader are cached. If this setting is instead set to 'generator', the processed content object is cached. Caching the processed content object may conflict with plugins (as some reading related signals may be skipped) and the WITH_FUTURE_DATES functionality (as the draft status of the cached content objects would not change automatically over time).

Checking modification times is faster than comparing file hashes, but it is not as reliable because mtime information can be lost, e.g., when copying content source files using the cp or rsync commands without the mtime preservation mode (which for rsync can be invoked by passing the --archive flag).

The cache files are Python pickles, so they may not be readable by different versions of Python as the pickle format often changes. If such an error is encountered, it is caught and the cache file is rebuilt automatically in the new format. The cache files will also be rebuilt after the GZIP_CACHE setting has been changed.

The --ignore-cache command-line option is useful when the whole cache needs to be regenerated, such as when making modifications to the settings file that will affect the cached content, or just for debugging purposes. When Pelican runs in autoreload mode, modification of the settings file will make it ignore the cache automatically if AUTORELOAD_IGNORE_CACHE is True.

Note that even when using cached content, all output is always written, so the modification times of the generated *.html files will always change. Therefore, rsync-based uploading may benefit from the --checksum option.

Example settings

AUTHOR = "Alexis Métaireau"
SITENAME = "Alexis' log"
SITESUBTITLE = "A personal blog."
SITEURL = "http://blog.notmyidea.org"
TIMEZONE = "Europe/Paris"
# can be useful in development, but set to False when you're ready to publish
RELATIVE_URLS = True
GITHUB_URL = "http://github.com/ametaireau/"
DISQUS_SITENAME = "blog-notmyidea"
REVERSE_CATEGORY_ORDER = True
LOCALE = "C"
DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 4
DEFAULT_DATE = (2012, 3, 2, 14, 1, 1)
FEED_ALL_RSS = "feeds/all.rss.xml"
CATEGORY_FEED_RSS = "feeds/{slug}.rss.xml"
LINKS = (
    ("Biologeek", "http://biologeek.org"),
    ("Filyb", "http://filyb.info/"),
    ("Libert-fr", "http://www.libert-fr.com"),
    ("N1k0", "http://prendreuncafe.com/blog/"),
    ("Tarek Ziadé", "http://ziade.org/blog"),
    ("Zubin Mithra", "http://zubin71.wordpress.com/"),
)
SOCIAL = (
    ("twitter", "http://twitter.com/ametaireau"),
    ("lastfm", "http://lastfm.com/user/akounet"),
    ("github", "http://github.com/ametaireau"),
)
# global metadata to all the contents
DEFAULT_METADATA = {"yeah": "it is"}
# path-specific metadata
EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {
    "extra/robots.txt": {"path": "robots.txt"},
}
# static paths will be copied without parsing their contents
STATIC_PATHS = [
    "images",
    "extra/robots.txt",
]
# custom page generated with a jinja2 template
TEMPLATE_PAGES = {"pages/jinja2_template.html": "jinja2_template.html"}
# there is no other HTML content
READERS = {"html": None}
# code blocks with line numbers
PYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS = {"linenos": "table"}
# foobar will not be used, because it's not in caps. All configuration keys
# have to be in caps
foobar = "barbaz"

Plugins

Beginning with version 3.0, Pelican supports plugins. Plugins are a way to add features to Pelican without having to directly modify the Pelican core.

How to use plugins

Starting with version 4.5, Pelican moved to a new plugin structure utilizing namespace packages that can be easily installed via Pip. Plugins supporting this structure will install under the namespace package pelican.plugins and can be automatically discovered by Pelican. To see a list of Pip-installed namespace plugins that are active in your environment, run:

pelican-plugins

If you leave the PLUGINS setting as default (None), Pelican will automatically discover namespace plugins and register them. If, on the other hand, you specify a PLUGINS setting as a list of plugins, this auto-discovery will be disabled. At that point, only the plugins you specify will be registered, and you must explicitly list any namespace plugins as well.

If you are using the PLUGINS setting, you can specify plugins in two ways. The first method specifies plugins as a list of strings. Namespace plugins can be specified either by their full names (pelican.plugins.myplugin) or by their short names (myplugin):

PLUGINS = ['package.myplugin',
           'namespace_plugin1',
           'pelican.plugins.namespace_plugin2']

Alternatively, you can import them in your settings file and pass the modules:

from package import myplugin
from pelican.plugins import namespace_plugin1, namespace_plugin2
PLUGINS = [myplugin, namespace_plugin1, namespace_plugin2]

NOTE:

If your plugins are not in an importable path, you can specify a list of paths via the PLUGIN_PATHS setting. As shown in the following example, paths in the PLUGIN_PATHS list can be absolute or relative to the settings file:

PLUGIN_PATHS = ["plugins", "/srv/pelican/plugins"]
PLUGINS = ["assets", "liquid_tags", "sitemap"]

Where to find plugins

Namespace plugins can be found in the pelican-plugins organization as individual repositories. Legacy plugins are located in the pelican-plugins repository and will be gradually phased out in favor of the namespace versions.

Please note that while we do our best to review and maintain these plugins, they are submitted by the Pelican community and thus may have varying levels of support and interoperability.

How to create plugins

Plugins are based on the concept of signals. Pelican sends signals, and plugins subscribe to those signals. The list of available signals is documented in a subsequent section.

The only rule to follow for plugins is to define a register callable, in which you map the signals to your plugin logic. Let's take a simple example:

import logging
from pelican import signals
log = logging.getLogger(__name__)
def test(sender):
    log.debug("%s initialized !!", sender)
def register():
    signals.initialized.connect(test)

NOTE:

If multiple plugins connect to the same signal, plugins will be executed in the order they are connected. With PLUGINS setting, order will be as defined in the setting. If you rely on auto-discovered namespace plugins, no PLUGINS setting, they will be connected in the same order they are discovered (same order as pelican-plugins output). If you want to specify the order explicitly, disable auto-discovery by defining PLUGINS in the desired order.

Namespace plugin structure

Namespace plugins must adhere to a certain structure in order to function properly. They need to be installable (i.e. contain setup.py or equivalent) and have a folder structure as follows:

myplugin
├── pelican
│   └── plugins
│       └── myplugin
│           ├── __init__.py
│           └── ...
├── ...
└── setup.py

It is crucial that pelican or pelican/plugins folder not contain an __init__.py file. In fact, it is best to have those folders empty besides the listed folders in the above structure and keep your plugin related files contained solely in the pelican/plugins/myplugin folder to avoid any issues.

To easily set up the proper structure, a cookiecutter template for plugins is provided. Refer to that project's README for instructions on how to use it.

List of signals

Here is the list of currently implemented signals:

WARNING:

NOTE:

Recipes

We eventually realised some of the recipes to create plugins would be best shared in the documentation somewhere, so here they are!

How to create a new reader

One thing you might want is to add support for your very own input format. While it might make sense to add this feature in Pelican core, we wisely chose to avoid this situation and instead have the different readers defined via plugins.

The rationale behind this choice is mainly that plugins are really easy to write and don't slow down Pelican itself when they're not active.

No more talking — here is an example:

from pelican import signals
from pelican.readers import BaseReader
# Create a new reader class, inheriting from the pelican.reader.BaseReader
class NewReader(BaseReader):
    enabled = True  # Yeah, you probably want that :-)
    # The list of file extensions you want this reader to match with.
    # If multiple readers were to use the same extension, the latest will
    # win (so the one you're defining here, most probably).
    file_extensions = ['yeah']
    # You need to have a read method, which takes a filename and returns
    # some content and the associated metadata.
    def read(self, filename):
        metadata = {'title': 'Oh yeah',
                    'category': 'Foo',
                    'date': '2012-12-01'}
        parsed = {}
        for key, value in metadata.items():
            parsed[key] = self.process_metadata(key, value)
        return "Some content", parsed
def add_reader(readers):
    readers.reader_classes['yeah'] = NewReader
# This is how pelican works.
def register():
    signals.readers_init.connect(add_reader)

Adding a new generator

Adding a new generator is also really easy. You might want to have a look at Pelican internals for more information on how to create your own generator.

def get_generators(pelican_object):
    # define a new generator here if you need to
    return MyGenerator
def register():
    signals.get_generators.connect(get_generators)

Adding a new writer

Adding a writer will allow you to output additional file formats to disk, or change how the existing formats are written to disk. Note that only one writer will be active at a time, so be sure to either subclass the built-in Writer, or completely re-implement it.

Here is a basic example of how to set up your own writer:

from pelican.writers import Writer
from pelican import signals
class MyWriter(Writer):
    # define new writer functionality
    pass
def add_writer(pelican_object):
    # use pelican_instance to setup stuff if needed
    return MyWriter
def register():
    signals.get_writer.connect(add_writer)

Using Plugins to Inject Content

You can programmatically inject articles or pages using plugins. This can be useful if you plan to fetch articles from an API, for example.

Following is a simple example of how one can build a plugin that injects a custom article, using the article_generator_pretaxonomy signal:

import datetime
from pelican import signals
from pelican.contents import Article
from pelican.readers import BaseReader
def addArticle(articleGenerator):
    settings = articleGenerator.settings
    # Author, category, and tags are objects, not strings, so they need to
    # be handled using BaseReader's process_metadata() function.
    baseReader = BaseReader(settings)
    content = "I am the body of an injected article!"
    newArticle = Article(content, {
        "title": "Injected Article!",
        "date": datetime.datetime.now(),
        "category": baseReader.process_metadata("category", "fromAPI"),
        "tags": baseReader.process_metadata("tags", "tagA, tagB")
    })
    articleGenerator.articles.insert(0, newArticle)
def register():
    signals.article_generator_pretaxonomy.connect(addArticle)

Themes

There is a community-managed repository of Pelican Themes for people to share and use.

Please note that while we do our best to review and merge theme contributions, they are submitted by the Pelican community and thus may have varying levels of support and interoperability.

Creating Themes

To generate its HTML output, Pelican uses the Jinja templating engine due to its flexibility and straightforward syntax. If you want to create your own theme, feel free to take inspiration from the "simple" theme.

To generate your site using a theme you have created (or downloaded manually and then modified), you can specify that theme via the -t flag:

pelican content -s pelicanconf.py -t /projects/your-site/themes/your-theme

If you'd rather not specify the theme on every invocation, you can define THEME in your settings to point to the location of your preferred theme.

Structure

To make your own theme, you must follow the following structure:

├── static
│   ├── css
│   └── images
└── templates
    ├── archives.html         // to display archives
    ├── article.html          // processed for each article
    ├── author.html           // processed for each author
    ├── authors.html          // must list all the authors
    ├── categories.html       // must list all the categories
    ├── category.html         // processed for each category
    ├── index.html            // the index (list all the articles)
    ├── page.html             // processed for each page
    ├── period_archives.html  // to display time-period archives
    ├── tag.html              // processed for each tag
    └── tags.html             // must list all the tags. Can be a tag cloud.

Templates and Variables

The idea is to use a simple syntax that you can embed into your HTML pages. This document describes which templates should exist in a theme, and which variables will be passed to each template at generation time.

All templates will receive the variables defined in your settings file, as long as they are in all-caps. You can access them directly.

Common Variables

All of these settings will be available to all templates.

Sorting

URL wrappers (currently categories, tags, and authors), have comparison methods that allow them to be easily sorted by name:

{% for tag, articles in tags|sort %}

If you want to sort based on different criteria, Jinja's sort command has a number of options.

Date Formatting

Pelican formats the date according to your settings and locale (DATE_FORMATS/DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT) and provides a locale_date attribute. On the other hand, the date attribute will be a datetime object. If you need custom formatting for a date different than your settings, use the Jinja filter strftime that comes with Pelican. Usage is same as Python strftime format, but the filter will do the right thing and format your date according to the locale given in your settings:

{{ article.date|strftime('%d %B %Y') }}

Checking Loaded Plugins

Pelican provides a plugin_enabled Jinja test for checking if a certain plugin is enabled. This test accepts a plugin name as a string and will return a Boolean. Namespace plugins can be specified by full name (pelican.plugins.plugin_name) or short name (plugin_name). The following example uses the webassets plugin to minify CSS if the plugin is enabled and otherwise falls back to regular CSS:

{% if "webassets" is plugin_enabled %}
    {% assets filters="cssmin", output="css/style.min.css", "css/style.scss" %}
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{SITEURL}}/{{ASSET_URL}}">
    {% endassets %}
{% else %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{SITEURL}}/css/style.css}">
{% endif %}

index.html

This is the home page or index of your blog, generated at index.html.

If pagination is active, subsequent pages will reside in index{number}.html.

author.html

This template will be processed for each of the existing authors, with output generated according to the AUTHOR_SAVE_AS setting (Default: author/{slug}.html). If pagination is active, subsequent pages will by default reside at author/{slug}{number}.html.

category.html

This template will be processed for each of the existing categories, with output generated according to the CATEGORY_SAVE_AS setting (Default: category/{slug}.html). If pagination is active, subsequent pages will by default reside at category/{slug}{number}.html.

article.html

This template will be processed for each article, with output generated according to the ARTICLE_SAVE_AS setting (Default: {slug}.html). The following variables are available when rendering.

Any metadata that you put in the header of the article source file will be available as fields on the article object. The field name will be the same as the name of the metadata field, except in all-lowercase characters.

For example, you could add a field called FacebookImage to your article metadata, as shown below:

Title: I love Python more than music
Date: 2013-11-06 10:06
Tags: personal, python
Category: Tech
Slug: python-je-l-aime-a-mourir
Author: Francis Cabrel
FacebookImage: http://franciscabrel.com/images/pythonlove.png

This new metadata will be made available as article.facebookimage in your article.html template. This would allow you, for example, to specify an image for the Facebook open graph tags that will change for each article:

<meta property="og:image" content="{{ article.facebookimage }}"/>

page.html

This template will be processed for each page, with output generated according to the PAGE_SAVE_AS setting (Default: pages/{slug}.html). The following variables are available when rendering.

tag.html

This template will be processed for each tag, with output generated according to the TAG_SAVE_AS setting (Default: tag/{slug}.html). If pagination is active, subsequent pages will by default reside at tag/{slug}{number}.html.

period_archives.html

This template will be processed for each year of your posts if a path for YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS is defined, each month if MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS is defined, and each day if DAY_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS is defined.

You can see an example of how to use period in the "simple" theme period_archives.html template.

Listing and Linking to Period Archives

The period_archives variable can be used to generate a list of links to the set of period archives that Pelican generates. As a common variable, it is available for use in any template, so you can implement such an index in a custom direct template, or in a sidebar visible across different site pages.

period_archives is a dict that may contain year, month, and/or day keys, depending on which *_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS settings are enabled. The corresponding value is a list of dicts, where each dict in turn represents a time period (ordered according to the NEWEST_FIRST_ARCHIVES setting) with the following keys and values:

Here is an example of how period_archives can be used in a template:

<ul>
{% for archive in period_archives.month %}
    <li>
        <a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ archive.url }}">
            {{ archive.period | reverse | join(' ') }} ({{ archive.articles|count }})
        </a>
    </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

You can change period_archives.month in the for statement to period_archives.year or period_archives.day as appropriate, depending on the time period granularity desired.

Objects

Detail objects attributes that are available and useful in templates. Not all attributes are listed here, this is a selection of attributes considered useful in a template.

Article

The string representation of an Article is the source_path attribute.

Author / Category / Tag

The string representation of those objects is the name attribute.

[1]

for Author object, coming from :authors: or AUTHOR.

Page

The string representation of a Page is the source_path attribute.

Feeds

The feed variables changed in 3.0. Each variable now explicitly lists ATOM or RSS in the name. ATOM is still the default. Old themes will need to be updated. Here is a complete list of the feed variables:

AUTHOR_FEED_ATOM
AUTHOR_FEED_RSS
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM
CATEGORY_FEED_RSS
FEED_ALL_ATOM
FEED_ALL_RSS
FEED_ATOM
FEED_RSS
TAG_FEED_ATOM
TAG_FEED_RSS
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM
TRANSLATION_FEED_RSS

Inheritance

Since version 3.0, Pelican supports inheritance from the simple theme, so you can re-use the simple theme templates in your own themes.

If one of the mandatory files in the templates/ directory of your theme is missing, it will be replaced by the matching template from the simple theme. So if the HTML structure of a template in the simple theme is right for you, you don't have to write a new template from scratch.

You can also extend templates from the simple theme in your own themes by using the {% extends %} directive as in the following example:

{% extends "!simple/index.html" %}   <!-- extends the ``index.html`` template from the ``simple`` theme -->
{% extends "index.html" %}   <!-- "regular" extending -->

Example

With this system, it is possible to create a theme with just two files.

base.html

The first file is the templates/base.html template:

{% extends "!simple/base.html" %}
{% block head %}
{{ super() }}
   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ SITEURL }}/theme/css/style.css" />
{% endblock %}

This file will be extended by all the other templates, so the stylesheet will be linked from all pages.

style.css

The second file is the static/css/style.css CSS stylesheet:

body {
    font-family : monospace ;
    font-size : 100% ;
    background-color : white ;
    color : #111 ;
    width : 80% ;
    min-width : 400px ;
    min-height : 200px ;
    padding : 1em ;
    margin : 5% 10% ;
    border : thin solid gray ;
    border-radius : 5px ;
    display : block ;
}
a:link    { color : blue ; text-decoration : none ;      }
a:hover   { color : blue ; text-decoration : underline ; }
a:visited { color : blue ;                               }
h1 a { color : inherit !important }
h2 a { color : inherit !important }
h3 a { color : inherit !important }
h4 a { color : inherit !important }
h5 a { color : inherit !important }
h6 a { color : inherit !important }
pre {
    margin : 2em 1em 2em 4em ;
}
#menu li {
    display : inline ;
}
#post-list {
    margin-bottom : 1em ;
    margin-top : 1em ;
}

Download

You can download this example theme here.

pelican-themes

Description

pelican-themes is a command line tool for managing themes for Pelican. See Themes for settings related to themes.

Usage

pelican-themes [-h] [-l] [-i theme path [theme path ...]]
[-r theme name [theme name ...]]
[-s theme path [theme path ...]] [-v] [--version]

Optional arguments:

Examples

Listing the installed themes

With pelican-themes, you can see the available themes by using the -l or --list option:

$ pelican-themes -l
notmyidea
two-column@
simple
$ pelican-themes --list
notmyidea
two-column@
simple

In this example, we can see there are three themes available: notmyidea, simple, and two-column.

two-column is followed by an @ because this theme is not copied to the Pelican theme path, but is instead just linked to it (see Creating symbolic links for details about creating symbolic links).

Note that you can combine the --list option with the -v or --verbose option to get more verbose output, like this:

$ pelican-themes -v -l
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pelican-2.6.0-py2.6.egg/pelican/themes/notmyidea
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pelican-2.6.0-py2.6.egg/pelican/themes/two-column (symbolic link to `/home/skami/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/two-column')
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pelican-2.6.0-py2.6.egg/pelican/themes/simple

Installing themes

You can install one or more themes using the -i or --install option. This option takes as argument the path(s) of the theme(s) you want to install, and can be combined with the --verbose option:

# pelican-themes --install ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/notmyidea-cms --verbose

# pelican-themes --install ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/notmyidea-cms\
                           ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/martyalchin \
                           --verbose

# pelican-themes -vi ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/two-column

Removing themes

The pelican-themes command can also remove themes from the Pelican themes path. The -r or --remove option takes as argument the name(s) of the theme(s) you want to remove, and can be combined with the --verbose option.

# pelican-themes --remove two-column

# pelican-themes -r martyachin notmyidea-cmd -v

Creating symbolic links

pelican-themes can also install themes by creating symbolic links instead of copying entire themes into the Pelican themes path.

To symbolically link a theme, you can use the -s or --symlink, which works exactly as the --install option:

# pelican-themes --symlink ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/two-column

In this example, the two-column theme is now symbolically linked to the Pelican themes path, so we can use it, but we can also modify it without having to reinstall it after each modification.

This is useful for theme development:

$ sudo pelican-themes -s ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/two-column
$ pelican ~/Blog/content -o /tmp/out -t two-column
$ firefox /tmp/out/index.html
$ vim ~/Dev/Pelican/pelican-themes/two-column/static/css/main.css
$ pelican ~/Blog/content -o /tmp/out -t two-column
$ cp /tmp/bg.png ~/Dev/Pelican/pelican-themes/two-column/static/img/bg.png
$ pelican ~/Blog/content -o /tmp/out -t two-column
$ vim ~/Dev/Pelican/pelican-themes/two-column/templates/index.html
$ pelican ~/Blog/content -o /tmp/out -t two-column

Doing several things at once

The --install, --remove and --symlink options are not mutually exclusive, so you can combine them in the same command line to do more than one operation at time, like this:

# pelican-themes --remove notmyidea-cms two-column \
                 --install ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/notmyidea-cms-fr \
                 --symlink ~/Dev/Python/pelican-themes/two-column \
                 --verbose

In this example, the theme notmyidea-cms is replaced by the theme notmyidea-cms-fr

Importing an existing site

Description

pelican-import is a command-line tool for converting articles from other software to reStructuredText or Markdown. The supported import formats are:

The conversion from HTML to reStructuredText or Markdown relies on Pandoc. For Dotclear, if the source posts are written with Markdown syntax, they will not be converted (as Pelican also supports Markdown).

NOTE:

Dependencies

pelican-import has some dependencies not required by the rest of Pelican:

Usage

pelican-import [-h] [--blogger] [--dotclear] [--tumblr] [--wpfile] [--feed]
               [-o OUTPUT] [-m MARKUP] [--dir-cat] [--dir-page] [--strip-raw] [--wp-custpost]
               [--wp-attach] [--disable-slugs] [-b BLOGNAME]
               input|api_key

Positional arguments

Optional arguments

Examples

For Blogger:

$ pelican-import --blogger -o ~/output ~/posts.xml

For Dotclear:

$ pelican-import --dotclear -o ~/output ~/backup.txt

For Tumblr:

$ pelican-import --tumblr -o ~/output --blogname=<blogname> <api_key>

For WordPress:

$ pelican-import --wpfile -o ~/output ~/posts.xml

Tests

To test the module, one can use sample files:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Here are some frequently asked questions about Pelican.

What's the best way to communicate a problem, question, or suggestion?

Please read our feedback guidelines.

How can I help?

There are several ways to help out. First, you can communicate any Pelican suggestions or problems you might have via Pelican Discussions. Please first check the existing list of discussions and issues (both open and closed) in order to avoid submitting topics that have already been covered before.

If you want to contribute, please fork the Git repository, create a new feature branch, make your changes, and issue a pull request. Someone will review your changes as soon as possible. Please refer to the How to Contribute section for more details.

You can also contribute by creating themes and improving the documentation.

Is the Pelican settings file mandatory?

Configuration files are optional and are just an easy way to configure Pelican. For basic operations, it's possible to specify options while invoking Pelican via the command line. See pelican --help for more information.

Changes to the settings file take no effect

When experimenting with different settings (especially the metadata ones) caching may interfere and the changes may not be visible. In such cases, ensure that caching is disabled via LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE = False or use the --ignore-cache command-line switch.

I'm creating my own theme. How do I use Pygments for syntax highlighting?

Pygments adds some classes to the generated content. These classes are used by themes to style code syntax highlighting via CSS. Specifically, you can customize the appearance of your syntax highlighting via the .highlight pre class in your theme's CSS file. To see how various styles can be used to render Django code, for example, use the style selector drop-down at top-right on the Pygments project demo site.

You can use the following example commands to generate a starting CSS file from a Pygments built-in style (in this case, "monokai") and then copy the generated CSS file to your new theme:

pygmentize -S monokai -f html -a .highlight > pygment.css
cp pygment.css path/to/theme/static/css/

Don't forget to import your pygment.css file from your main CSS file.

How do I create my own theme?

Please refer to Themes.

I want to use Markdown, but I got an error.

If you try to generate Markdown content without first installing the Markdown library, you may see a message that says No valid files found in content. Markdown is not a hard dependency for Pelican, so if you have content in Markdown format, you will need to explicitly install the Markdown library. You can do so by typing the following command, prepending sudo if permissions require it:

python -m pip install markdown

Can I use arbitrary metadata in my templates?

Yes. For example, to include a modified date in a Markdown post, one could include the following at the top of the article:

Modified: 2012-08-08

For reStructuredText, this metadata should of course be prefixed with a colon:

:Modified: 2012-08-08

This metadata can then be accessed in templates such as article.html via:

{% if article.modified %}
Last modified: {{ article.modified }}
{% endif %}

If you want to include metadata in templates outside the article context (e.g., base.html), the if statement should instead be:

{% if article and article.modified %}

How do I assign custom templates on a per-page basis?

It's as simple as adding an extra line of metadata to any page or article that you want to have its own template. For example, this is how it would be handled for content in reST format:

:template: template_name

For content in Markdown format:

Template: template_name

Then just make sure your theme contains the relevant template file (e.g. template_name.html).

How can I override the generated URL of a specific page or article?

Include url and save_as metadata in any pages or articles that you want to override the generated URL. Here is an example page in reST format:

Override url/save_as page
#########################
:url: override/url/
:save_as: override/url/index.html

With this metadata, the page will be written to override/url/index.html and Pelican will use the URL override/url/ to link to this page.

How can I use a static page as my home page?

The override feature mentioned above can be used to specify a static page as your home page. The following Markdown example could be stored in content/pages/home.md:

Title: Welcome to My Site
URL:
save_as: index.html
Thank you for visiting. Welcome!

If the original blog index is still wanted, it can then be saved in a different location by setting INDEX_SAVE_AS = 'blog_index.html' for the 'index' direct template.

What if I want to disable feed generation?

To disable feed generation, all feed settings should be set to None. All but three feed settings already default to None, so if you want to disable all feed generation, you only need to specify the following settings:

FEED_ALL_ATOM = None
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM = None
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM = None
AUTHOR_FEED_ATOM = None
AUTHOR_FEED_RSS = None

The word None should not be surrounded by quotes. Please note that None and '' are not the same thing.

I'm getting a warning about feeds generated without SITEURL being set properly

RSS and Atom feeds require all URL links to be absolute. In order to properly generate links in Pelican you will need to set SITEURL to the full path of your site.

Feeds are still generated when this warning is displayed, but links within may be malformed and thus the feed may not validate.

Can I force Atom feeds to show only summaries instead of article content?

Instead of having to open a separate browser window to read articles, the overwhelming majority of folks who use feed readers prefer to read content within the feed reader itself. Mainly for that reason, Pelican does not support restricting Atom feeds to only contain summaries. Unlike Atom feeds, the RSS feed specification does not include a separate content field, so by default Pelican publishes RSS feeds that only contain summaries (but can optionally be set to instead publish full content RSS feeds). So the default feed generation behavior provides users with a choice: subscribe to Atom feeds for full content or to RSS feeds for just the summaries.

Is Pelican only suitable for blogs?

No. Pelican can be easily configured to create and maintain any type of static site. This may require a little customization of your theme and Pelican configuration. For example, if you are building a launch site for your product and do not need tags on your site, you could remove the relevant HTML code from your theme. You can also disable generation of tag-related pages via:

TAGS_SAVE_AS = ''
TAG_SAVE_AS = ''

Why does Pelican always write all HTML files even with content caching enabled?

In order to reliably determine whether the HTML output is different before writing it, a large part of the generation environment including the template contexts, imported plugins, etc. would have to be saved and compared, at least in the form of a hash (which would require special handling of unhashable types), because of all the possible combinations of plugins, pagination, etc. which may change in many different ways. This would require a lot more processing time and memory and storage space. Simply writing the files each time is a lot faster and a lot more reliable.

However, this means that the modification time of the files changes every time, so a rsync based upload will transfer them even if their content hasn't changed. A simple solution is to make rsync use the --checksum option, which will make it compare the file checksums in a much faster way than Pelican would.

How to process only a subset of all articles?

It is often useful to process only e.g. 10 articles for debugging purposes. This can be achieved by explicitly specifying only the filenames of those articles in ARTICLE_PATHS. A list of such filenames could be found using a command similar to cd content; find -name '*.md' | head -n 10.

My tag cloud is missing/broken since I upgraded Pelican

In an ongoing effort to streamline Pelican, tag cloud generation has been moved out of Pelican core and into a separate plugin. See the Plugins documentation for further information about the Pelican plugin system.

Since I upgraded Pelican my pages are no longer rendered

Pages were available to themes as lowercase pages and uppercase PAGES. To bring this inline with the Templates and Variables section, PAGES has been removed. This is quickly resolved by updating your theme to iterate over pages instead of PAGES. Just replace:

{% for pg in PAGES %}

with something like:

{% for pg in pages %}

How can I stop Pelican from trying to parse my static files as content?

Pelican's article and page generators run before it's static generator. That means if you use a setup similar to the default configuration, where a static source directory is defined inside a *_PATHS setting, all files that have a valid content file ending (.html, .rst, .md, ...) will be treated as articles or pages before they get treated as static files.

To circumvent this issue either use the appropriate *_EXCLUDES setting or disable the offending reader via READERS if you don't need it.

Why is [arbitrary Markdown syntax] not supported?

Pelican does not directly handle Markdown processing and instead delegates that task to the Python-Markdown project, the core of which purposefully follows the original Markdown syntax rules and not the myriad Markdown "flavors" that have subsequently propagated. That said, Python-Markdown is quite modular, and the syntax you are looking for may be provided by one of the many available Markdown Extensions. Alternatively, some folks have created Pelican plugins that support Markdown variants, so that may be your best choice if there is a particular variant you want to use when writing your content.

Tips

Here are some tips about Pelican that you might find useful.

Custom 404 Pages

When a browser requests a resource that the web server cannot find, the web server usually displays a generic "File not found" (404) error page that can be stark and unsightly. One way to provide an error page that matches the theme of your site is to create a custom 404 page (not an article), such as this Markdown-formatted example stored in content/pages/404.md:

Title: Not Found
Status: hidden
Save_as: 404.html
The requested item could not be located. Perhaps you might want to check
the [Archives](/archives.html)?

The next step is to configure your web server to display this custom page instead of its default 404 page. For Nginx, add the following to your configuration file's location block:

error_page 404 /404.html;

For Apache:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

For Amazon S3, first navigate to the Static Site Hosting menu in the bucket settings on your AWS console. From there:

Error Document: 404.html

Publishing to GitHub Pages

If you use GitHub for your Pelican site you can publish your site to GitHub Pages for free. Your site will be published to https://<username>.github.io if it's a user or organization site or to https://<username>.github.io/<repository> if it's a project site. It's also possible to use a custom domain with GitHub Pages.

There are two ways to publish a site to GitHub Pages:

Publishing a Project Site to GitHub Pages from a Branch

To publish a Pelican site as a Project Page you need to push the content of the output dir generated by Pelican to a repository's gh-pages branch on GitHub.

The excellent ghp-import, which can be installed with pip, makes this process really easy.

For example, if the source of your Pelican site is contained in a GitHub repository, and if you want to publish that Pelican site in the form of Project Pages to this repository, you can then use the following:

$ pelican content -o output -s pelicanconf.py
$ ghp-import output -b gh-pages
$ git push origin gh-pages

The ghp-import output command updates the local gh-pages branch with the content of the output directory (creating the branch if it doesn't already exist). The git push origin gh-pages command updates the remote gh-pages branch, effectively publishing the Pelican site.

NOTE:

Publishing a User Site to GitHub Pages from a Branch

To publish a Pelican site in the form of User Pages, you need to push the content of the output dir generated by Pelican to the master branch of your <username>.github.io repository on GitHub.

Again, you can take advantage of ghp-import:

$ pelican content -o output -s pelicanconf.py
$ ghp-import output -b gh-pages
$ git push git@github.com:elemoine/elemoine.github.io.git gh-pages:master

The git push command pushes the local gh-pages branch (freshly updated by the ghp-import command) to the elemoine.github.io repository's master branch on GitHub.

NOTE:

Another option for publishing to User Pages is to generate the output files in the root directory of the project.

For example, your main project folder is <username>.github.io and you can create the Pelican project in a subdirectory called Pelican. Then from inside the Pelican folder you can run:

$ pelican content -o .. -s pelicanconf.py

Now you can push the whole project <username>.github.io to the master branch of your GitHub repository:

$ git push origin master

(assuming origin is set to your remote repository).

Publishing to GitHub Pages Using a Custom GitHub Actions Workflow

Pelican comes with a custom workflow for publishing a Pelican site. To use it:

name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
on:
  push:
    branches: ["main"]
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  deploy:
    uses: "getpelican/pelican/.github/workflows/github_pages.yml@master"
    permissions:
      contents: "read"
      pages: "write"
      id-token: "write"
    with:
      settings: "publishconf.py"

Notes:

See GitHub's docs about reusable workflows for more information.

A number of optional inputs can be added to the with: block when calling the workflow:

For example:

with:
  settings: "publishconf.py"
  requirements: "pelican[markdown] typogrify"
  output-path: "__output__/"

Custom 404 Pages

GitHub Pages will display the custom 404 page described above, as noted in the relevant GitHub docs.

Update your site on each commit

To automatically update your Pelican site on each commit, you can create a post-commit hook. For example, you can add the following to .git/hooks/post-commit:

pelican content -o output -s pelicanconf.py && ghp-import output && git push origin gh-pages

Copy static files to the root of your site

To use a custom domain with GitHub Pages, you need to put the domain of your site (e.g., blog.example.com) inside a CNAME file at the root of your site. To do this, create the content/extra/ directory and add a CNAME file to it. Then use the STATIC_PATHS setting to tell Pelican to copy this file to your output directory. For example:

STATIC_PATHS = ['images', 'extra/CNAME']
EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {'extra/CNAME': {'path': 'CNAME'},}

Note: use forward slashes, /, even on Windows.

You can also use the EXTRA_PATH_METADATA mechanism to place a favicon.ico or robots.txt at the root of any site.

How to add YouTube or Vimeo Videos

The easiest way is to paste the embed code of the video from these sites directly into your source content.

Alternatively, you can also use Pelican plugins like liquid_tags, pelican_youtube, or pelican_vimeo to embed videos in your content.

Moreover, markup languages like reST and Markdown have plugins that let you embed videos in the markup. You can use reST video directive for reST or mdx_video plugin for Markdown.

Develop Locally Using SSL

Here's how you can set up your local pelican server to support SSL.

First, create a self-signed certificate and key using openssl (this creates cert.pem and key.pem):

$ openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 365 -nodes

And use this command to launch the server (the server starts within your output directory):

python -m pelican.server 8443 --key=../key.pem --cert=../cert.pem

If you are using develop-server.sh, add this to the top:

CERT="$BASEDIR/cert.pem"
KEY="$BASEDIR/key.pem"

and modify the pelican.server line as follows:

$PY -m pelican.server $port --ssl --cert="$CERT" --key="$KEY" &

Contributing and feedback guidelines

There are many ways to contribute to Pelican. You can improve the documentation, add missing features, and fix bugs (or just report them). You can also help out by reviewing and commenting on existing issues.

Don't hesitate to fork Pelican and submit an issue or pull request on GitHub. When doing so, please consider the following guidelines.

Filing issues

How to get help

Before you ask for help, please make sure you do the following:

NOTE: The most common sources of problems are anomalies in (1) themes, (2) plugins, (3) settings files, and (4) make/invoke automation wrappers. If you can't reproduce your problem when using the following steps to generate your site, then the problem is almost certainly with one of the above-listed elements (and not Pelican itself):

cd ~/projects/your-site
git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican ~/projects/pelican
pelican content -s ~/projects/pelican/samples/pelican.conf.py -t ~/projects/pelican/pelican/themes/notmyidea

If you can generate your site without problems using the steps above, then your problem is unlikely to be caused by Pelican itself, and therefore please consider reaching out to the maintainers of the plugins/theme you are using instead of raising the topic with the Pelican core community.

If despite the above efforts you still cannot resolve your problem, be sure to include in your inquiry the following information, preferably in the form of links to content uploaded to a paste service, GitHub repository, or other publicly-accessible location:

Once the above preparation is ready, you can post your query as a new thread in Pelican Discussions. Remember to include all the information you prepared.

Contributing code

Before you submit a contribution, please ask whether it is desired so that you don't spend a lot of time working on something that would be rejected for a known reason. Consider also whether your new feature might be better suited as a 'plugins — you can ask for help to make that determination.

Also, if you intend to submit a pull request to address something for which there is no existing issue, there is no need to create a new issue and then immediately submit a pull request that closes it. You can submit the pull request by itself.

Using Git and GitHub

Release type: minor
Reload browser window upon changes to content, settings, or theme

Contribution quality standards

Check out our Git Tips page or ask for help if you need assistance or have any questions about these guidelines.

Setting up the development environment

While there are many ways to set up one's development environment, the following instructions will utilize Pip and PDM. These tools facilitate managing virtual environments for separate Python projects that are isolated from one another, so you can use different packages (and package versions) for each.

Please note that Python >=3.8.1 is required for Pelican development.

(Optional) If you prefer to install PDM once for use with multiple projects, you can install it via:

curl -sSL https://pdm.fming.dev/install-pdm.py | python3 -

Point your web browser to the Pelican repository and tap the Fork button at top-right. Then clone the source for your fork and add the upstream project as a Git remote:

mkdir ~/projects
git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/pelican.git ~/projects/pelican
cd ~/projects/pelican
git remote add upstream https://github.com/getpelican/pelican.git

While PDM can dynamically create and manage virtual environments, we're going to manually create and activate a virtual environment:

mkdir ~/virtualenvs && cd ~/virtualenvs
python3 -m venv pelican
source ~/virtualenvs/pelican/*/activate

Install the needed dependencies and set up the project:

python -m pip install invoke
invoke setup

Your local environment should now be ready to go!

Development

Once Pelican has been set up for local development, create a topic branch for your bug fix or feature:

git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

Now you can make changes to Pelican, its documentation, and/or other aspects of the project.

Running the test suite

Each time you make changes to Pelican, there are two things to do regarding tests: check that the existing tests pass, and add tests for any new features or bug fixes. The tests are located in pelican/tests, and you can run them via:

invoke tests

(For more on Invoke, see invoke -l to list tasks, or https://pyinvoke.org for documentation.)

In addition to running the test suite, it is important to also ensure that any lines you changed conform to code style guidelines. You can check that via:

invoke lint

If code style violations are found in lines you changed, correct those lines and re-run the above lint command until they have all been fixed. You do not need to address style violations, if any, for code lines you did not touch.

After making your changes and running the tests, you may see a test failure mentioning that "some generated files differ from the expected functional tests output." If you have made changes that affect the HTML output generated by Pelican, and the changes to that output are expected and deemed correct given the nature of your changes, then you should update the output used by the functional tests. To do so, make sure you have both en_EN.utf8 and fr_FR.utf8 locales installed, and then run the following command:

invoke update-functional-tests

You may also find that some tests are skipped because some dependency (e.g., Pandoc) is not installed. This does not automatically mean that these tests have passed; you should at least verify that any skipped tests are not affected by your changes.

You should run the test suite under each of the supported versions of Python. This is best done by creating a separate Python environment for each version. Tox is a useful tool to automate running tests inside virtualenv environments.

Building the docs

If you make changes to the documentation, you should build and inspect your changes before committing them:

invoke docserve

Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser to review the documentation. While the above task is running, any changes you make and save to the documentation should automatically appear in the browser, as it live-reloads when it detects changes to the documentation source files.

Plugin development

To create a new Pelican plugin, please refer to the plugin template repository for detailed instructions.

If you want to contribute to an existing Pelican plugin, follow the steps above to set up Pelican for local development, and then create a directory to store cloned plugin repositories:

mkdir -p ~/projects/pelican-plugins

Assuming you wanted to contribute to the Simple Footnotes plugin, you would first browse to the Simple Footnotes repository on GitHub and tap the Fork button at top-right. Then clone the source for your fork and add the upstream project as a Git remote:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/simple-footnotes.git ~/projects/pelican-plugins/simple-footnotes
cd ~/projects/pelican-plugins/simple-footnotes
git remote add upstream https://github.com/pelican-plugins/simple-footnotes.git

Install the needed dependencies and set up the project:

invoke setup

Create a topic branch for your plugin bug fix or feature:

git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

After writing new tests for your plugin changes, run the plugin test suite and check for code style compliance via:

invoke tests
invoke lint

If style violations are found, many of them can be addressed automatically via:

invoke format

If style violations are found even after running the above auto-formatters, you will need to make additional manual changes until invoke lint no longer reports any code style violations.

Submitting your changes

Assuming linting validation and tests pass, add a RELEASE.md file in the root of the project that contains the release type (major, minor, patch) and a summary of the changes that will be used as the release changelog entry. For example:

Release type: patch
Fix browser reloading upon changes to content, settings, or theme

Commit your changes and push your topic branch:

git add .
git commit -m "Your detailed description of your changes"
git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

Finally, browse to your repository fork on GitHub and submit a pull request.

Logging tips

Try to use logging with appropriate levels.

For logging messages that are not repeated, use the usual Python way:

# at top of file
import logging
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
# when needed
logger.warning("A warning with %s formatting", arg_to_be_formatted)

Do not format log messages yourself. Use %s formatting in messages and pass arguments to logger. This is important, because the Pelican logger will preprocess some arguments, such as exceptions.

Limiting extraneous log messages

If the log message can occur several times, you may want to limit the log to prevent flooding. In order to do that, use the extra keyword argument for the logging message in the following format:

logger.warning("A warning with %s formatting", arg_to_be_formatted,
    extra={'limit_msg': 'A generic message for too many warnings'})

Optionally, you can also set 'limit_args' as a tuple of arguments in extra dict if your generic message needs formatting.

Limit is set to 5, i.e, first four logs with the same 'limit_msg' are outputted normally but the fifth one will be logged using 'limit_msg' (and 'limit_args' if present). After the fifth, corresponding log messages will be ignored.

For example, if you want to log missing resources, use the following code:

for resource in resources:
    if resource.is_missing:
        logger.warning(
            'The resource %s is missing', resource.name,
            extra={'limit_msg': 'Other resources were missing'})

The log messages will be displayed as follows:

WARNING: The resource prettiest_cat.jpg is missing
WARNING: The resource best_cat_ever.jpg is missing
WARNING: The resource cutest_cat.jpg is missing
WARNING: The resource lolcat.jpg is missing
WARNING: Other resources were missing

Outputting traceback in the logs

If you're logging inside an except block, you may want to provide the traceback information as well. You can do that by setting exc_info keyword argument to True during logging. However, doing so by default can be undesired because tracebacks are long and can be confusing to regular users. Try to limit them to --debug mode like the following:

try:
    some_action()
except Exception as e:
    logger.error('Exception occurred: %s', e,
        exc_info=settings.get('DEBUG', False))

Pelican internals

This section describe how Pelican works internally. As you'll see, it's quite simple, but a bit of documentation doesn't hurt. :)

You can also find in the Some history about Pelican section an excerpt of a report the original author wrote with some software design information.

Overall structure

What Pelican does is take a list of files and process them into some sort of output. Usually, the input files are reStructuredText and Markdown files, and the output is a blog, but both input and output can be anything you want.

The logic is separated into different classes and concepts:

How to implement a new reader?

Is there an awesome markup language you want to add to Pelican? Well, the only thing you have to do is to create a class with a read method that returns HTML content and some metadata.

Take a look at the Markdown reader:

from pelican.readers import BaseReader
from pelican.utils import pelican_open
from markdown import Markdown
class MarkdownReader(BaseReader):
    enabled = True
    def read(self, source_path):
        """Parse content and metadata of markdown files"""
        with pelican_open(source_path) as text:
            md_extensions = {'markdown.extensions.meta': {},
                             'markdown.extensions.codehilite': {}}
            md = Markdown(extensions=md_extensions.keys(),
                          extension_configs=md_extensions)
            content = md.convert(text)
        metadata = {}
        for name, value in md.Meta.items():
            name = name.lower()
            meta = self.process_metadata(name, value[0])
            metadata[name] = meta
        return content, metadata

Simple, isn't it?

If your new reader requires additional Python dependencies, then you should wrap their import statements in a try...except block. Then inside the reader's class, set the enabled class attribute to mark import success or failure. This makes it possible for users to continue using their favourite markup method without needing to install modules for formats they don't use.

How to implement a new generator?

Generators have two important methods. You're not forced to create both; only the existing ones will be called.

Some history about Pelican

WARNING:

Pelican is a simple static blog generator. It parses markup files (Markdown or reStructuredText for now) and generates an HTML folder with all the files in it. I've chosen to use Python to implement Pelican because it seemed to be simple and to fit to my needs. I did not wanted to define a class for each thing, but still wanted to keep my things loosely coupled. It turns out that it was exactly what I wanted. From time to time, thanks to the feedback of some users, it took me a very few time to provide fixes on it. So far, I've re-factored the Pelican code by two times; each time took less than 30 minutes.

Use case

I was previously using WordPress, a solution you can host on a web server to manage your blog. Most of the time, I prefer using markup languages such as Markdown or reStructuredText to type my articles. To do so, I use vim. I think it is important to let the people choose the tool they want to write the articles. In my opinion, a blog manager should just allow you to take any kind of input and transform it to a weblog. That's what Pelican does. You can write your articles using the tool you want, and the markup language you want, and then generate a static HTML weblog. [image]

To be flexible enough, Pelican has template support, so you can easily write your own themes if you want to.

Design process

Pelican came from a need I have. I started by creating a single file application, and I have make it grow to support what it does by now. To start, I wrote a piece of documentation about what I wanted to do. Then, I created the content I wanted to parse (the reStructuredText files) and started experimenting with the code. Pelican was 200 lines long and contained almost ten functions and one class when it was first usable.

I have been facing different problems all over the time and wanted to add features to Pelican while using it. The first change I have done was to add the support of a settings file. It is possible to pass the options to the command line, but can be tedious if there is a lot of them. In the same way, I have added the support of different things over time: Atom feeds, multiple themes, multiple markup support, etc. At some point, it appears that the "only one file" mantra was not good enough for Pelican, so I decided to rework a bit all that, and split this in multiple different files.

I’ve separated the logic in different classes and concepts:

I also deal with contents objects. They can be Articles, Pages, Quotes, or whatever you want. They are defined in the contents.py module and represent some content to be used by the program.

In more detail

Here is an overview of the classes involved in Pelican. [image]

The interface does not really exist, and I have added it only to clarify the whole picture. I do use duck typing and not interfaces.

Internally, the following process is followed:

I make two calls because it is important that when the output is generated by the generators, the context will not change. In other words, the first method generate_context should modify the context, whereas the second generate_output method should not.

Then, it is up to the generators to do what the want, in the generate_context and generate_content method. Taking the ArticlesGenerator class will help to understand some others concepts. Here is what happens when calling the generate_context method:

Then, the generate_content method uses the context and the writer to generate the wanted output.

Release history

4.9.1 - 2023-11-15

4.9.0 - 2023-11-12

4.8.0 - 2022-07-11

4.7.2 - 2022-02-09

4.7.1 - 2021-10-12

4.7.0 - 2021-10-01

4.6.0 - 2021-03-23

4.5.4 - 2021-01-04

Replace plugin definitions in settings with string representations after registering, so they can be cached correctly (#2828).

4.5.3 - 2020-12-01

Fix a mistake made in PR #2821

4.5.2 - 2020-11-22

Improve logging of generators and writer loaders

4.5.1 - 2020-11-02

4.5.0 - 2020-08-20

4.2.0 - 2019-10-17

4.1.3 - 2019-10-09

4.1.2 - 2019-09-23

Fix pelican.settings.load_source to avoid caching issues - PR #2621

4.1.1 - 2019-08-23

4.1.0 - 2019-07-14

4.0.1 (2018-11-30)

If upgrading from 3.7.x or earlier, please note that slug-related settings in 4.0+ use {slug} and/or {lang} rather than %s. If %s-style settings are encountered, Pelican will emit a warning and fall back to the default setting. Some user-submitted themes might try to format setting values but fail upon site build with a TypeError. In such cases, the theme needs to be updated. For example, instead of TAG_FEED_ATOM|format(tag.slug), use TAG_FEED_ATOM.format(slug=tag.slug)

4.0.0 (2018-11-13)

3.7.1 (2017-01-10)

3.7.0 (2016-12-12)

3.6.3 (2015-08-14)

3.6.2 (2015-08-01)

3.6.0 (2015-06-15)

3.5.0 (2014-11-04)

3.4.0 (2014-07-01)

3.3.0 (2013-09-24)

3.2.1 and 3.2.2

3.2 (2013-04-24)

3.1 (2012-12-04)

3.0 (2012-08-08)

2.8 (2012-02-28)

2.7 (2011-06-11)

2.6 (2011-03-08)

2.5 (2010-11-20)

2.4 (2010-11-06)

2.3 (2010-10-31)

2.2 (2010-10-30)

2.1 (2010-10-30)

2.0 (2010-10-30)

1.2 (2010-09-28)

1.1 (2010-08-19)